Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Halfway through Beautiful Creatures, I remember thinking, “Hey, this is like The Witching Hour, but for teenagers!” The Witching Hour is probably my favorite Anne Rice book of all time, so this is high praise coming from me. It’s different, of course — Beautiful Creatures is much more PG-rated and unfolds at a faster pace — but both are big, meaty books featuring antebellum mansions, hidden witch families, curses generations in the making, and one pure love to stand against evil.

Ethan Wate seems like an ordinary teenage boy. Beneath the surface, though, he’s itching to escape his tiny hometown of Gatlin, with its closed minds and stagnation. (I loved the little detail about how... Read More

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

(Note: The second half of this review contains spoilers for the plot of the previous book, Beautiful Creatures, so if you have not yet read this first book of the CASTER CHRONICLES, you may want to read it before reading further about Beautiful Darkness)

The latest adolescent fiction to become a popular film, Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, bears some resemblance to the TWILIGHT SAGA, but in some essential ways, it is a story with more depth and complexity. Kelly has already reviewed Beautiful Creatures, the first novel in the CASTER CHRONICLES series, so I will focus my reviews on the latter three books, after some brief comments about what sets this series, in my opinion, above the  Read More