Beautiful Creatures
Where to buy Gorgeous Creatures books online?
- ISBN13: 9780316042673
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Product Description
Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the tiny Southern town of
Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a gorgeous girl he has never met. When
In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.Amazon.com Review
Ethan Wate is struggling to hide his apathy for his high school “in” crowd in tiny town Gatlin, South Carolina, until he meets the determinedly “out” Lena Duchannes, the girl of his dreams (factually–she has been in his nightmares for months). What follows is a smart, modern fantasy–a tale of star-crossed lovers and a dark, treacherous secret. Gorgeous Creatures is a tasty southern Gothic that charms you from the first page, drawing you into a dark world of magic and mystery until you emerge gasping and blinking, wondering what happened to the last few hours (and how many more you’re willing to give up). To tell too much of the plot would spoil the thrill of discovery, and judge me, you will want to uncover the secrets of this richly imagined dark fantasy on your own. –Daphne Durham
Amazon Exclusive Interview with Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Authors of Gorgeous Creatures
What does your writing process look like? Is it tough to write a book together? Did you ever have any knock-down drag-out fights over a plot point or character trait?
Margie: The best way to clarify our writing process is like a running stitch. We don’t write separate chapters, or characters. We pass the draft back and into the world constantly, and we really write over each additional’s work, until we get to the point where we truly don’t know who has written what.
Kami: By the end of the book, we don’t even know. The classic example is when I said, “Marg, I really despise that line. It has to go.” And she said, “Cut it. You wrote it.”
Margie: I reflect we were friends for so long before we were writing partners that there was an unusual amount of trust from the start.
Kami: It’s about respect. And it helps that we can’t remember when who wrote the terrible line.
Margie: We save our huge fights for the vital things, like the lack of ice in my house or how cold our office is. And why none of my YouTube videos are as well loved as the one of Kami’s three-fingered typing…okay, that one is understandable, agreed the page count for “Gorgeous Creatures.”
Kami: What can I say? I was saving the additional seven fingers for the sequel.
What kinds of books do you like to read?
Kami: I read nearly exclusively Young Adult fiction, with some Middle Grade fiction thrown in for excellent measure. As a Reading Specialist, I work with children and teens in grades K-12, so basically I read what they read.
Margie: When I write it comes from the same place as when I read: wanting to hang out with fictional characters in fictional worlds. I identify more as a reader than a writer; I just have to write it first so I can read it.
What books/authors have inspired you?
Kami: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “A Excellent Man is Hard to Find & Additional Tales” by Flannery O’Connor, “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury and “The Witching Hour” by Anne Rice. I also like Pablo Neruda.
Margie: I reflect Harper Lee is the greatest writer alive today. Eudora Welty is my additional Southern writer kindred; I was obsessed with her in grad school. Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones made me like fantasy, and my favorite poets are Emily Dickinson (at Amherst College, I even lived on her street) and Stevie Smith.
Did you set out to write fiction for young adults? Why?
Kami: We really wrote “Gorgeous Creatures” on a dare from some of the teen readers in our lives.
Margie: Not so much readers as bosses.
Kami: Looking back, we wrote it sort of like the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens, turning in pages to our teen readers every week.
Margie: And by week she means day.
Kami: When we were getting texts in the middle of the night from teens demanding more pages, we knew we had to end.
Margie: As it says in our acknowledgements, their asking what happened next changed what happened next. Teens are so authentic. That’s probably why we like YA. Even when it’s fantasy, it’s the emotional truth.
A lot of us voracious readers like to cast a book after reading it. Did you guys have a shared view of who your characters are? Did each of you take a different character to renovate, or did you share every aspect?
Kami: We’ve never cast our characters, but we certainly know what they look like. Sometimes we see actors in magazines and say, “Lena just wore that!”
Margie: We make all our characters together, but after a point they became as real as any of the additional people we know. We forget they’re not.
Kami: I never thought of it like that. I guess we do spend all our time talking about imaginary people. Margie: So long as it’s not to them…
Did you permanently plot to start the book with Ethan’s tale? Why?
Kami: We knew before we ongoing that we wanted to write from a boy’s point of view. Margie and I both have brothers—-six, between us-—so it wasn’t a stretch. It’s an appealing experience to fall in like with the guy telling the tale rather than the guy the tale is about.
Margie: We do kind of like Ethan, so we wanted there to be more to him than just the boy from boy meets girl.
Kami: He’s the guy who stands by you at all costs and accepts you for who you are, even if you aren’t reasonably sure who that is.
What is on your nightstand now?
Kami: I have a huge stack, but here are ones at the top: “Mama Dip’s Kitchen,” a cookbook by Mildred Council, “The Demon’s Lexicon” by Sarah Rees Brennan, “Shadowed Summer” by Saundra Mitchell, “Rampant” by Diana Peterfreund, and an Advanced Reader Copy of “Sisters Red” by Jackson Pearce.
Margie: I have Robin McKinley’s “Beauty,” Maggie Stiefvater’s “Ballad,” Kristen Cashore’s “Fire,” Libba Bray’s “Going Bovine,” and “Everything Is Fine” by AnnDee Ellis. And now I’m mad because I know a) Kami stole my “Rampant” and b) didn’t tell me she has “Sisters Red”!
What is your thought of comfort reading?
Kami: If agreed the choice, I’ll permanently reach for a paranormal romance or an urban fantasy. I also re-read my favorite books over and over.
Margie: It’s all comfort reading to me. I sleep with books in my bed. Like a dog, only lacking the shedding and the smelling.
Have you written the next book already? What’s next for Lena and Ethan?
Margie: We are revising the next book now. I don’t want to give too much away, but summer in Gatlin isn’t permanently a trip.
Kami: I would clarify book two as intense and emotional. For Ethan and Lena, the stakes are even privileged.
Margie: That’s right. Book two involves right like, broken hearts, the Seventeenth Moon, and cream-of-grief casseroles…
Kami: Gatlin at it’s finest!
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A boy meets girl, girl has mystical powers, everyone in the backwards small Southern town despises her because she’s different tale. The book has a bit of a spooky feel that might be a small much for younger readers though it never gets gory or TOO scary. This wouldn’t be a terrible introduction to the supernatural/horror writing genre for younger readers.
While not a terrible book it feels a small too… sanitized. The cruelty of cheerleaders and debutantes (and their parents) towards an ‘outsider’ just didn’t seem all that cruel. Most of it’s laughable grammar school name calling and shunning. There’s one fight between jocks, it’s a push, a shove, a name falls… and then it’s over. Nobody acts out, sasses or talks back to their parents or teachers. No one even swears. They just don’t feel like real teenagers.
The writing is decent the characters are well developed and honestly well rounded though towards the end they seem to get a small stupid just to fit into the plot. Not exceptional but worth reading.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Gorgeous creatures is a book about a boy living in a tiny town who is enthralled by a new girl who moves to town and then spooky things start to take place which link them.
Sound famillar?
This book is close to six hundred and fifty pages long and it feels like it’s that long. One hundred and fifty pages into the book and there still isn’t a plot that makes me want to pick the book up. The action happens slowly and isn’t compelling, that paired with a book that’s over six hundred pages makes for a terrible combination.
I’d skip this one and read somthing that’s more enchanting.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I can’t help but agree with the previous reviewer, S. Power, who summed it up thusly: “It’s really long.”
I’ll take it further:
It’s *really* long, drawn out, and I establish it to be more superficial than anything.
The tale is written in the first person, which I am about sick of seeing (it seems a book doesn’t qualify as a paranormal lacking it being in the first person anymore)… but the problem falls in that in order for a book to be a success as a first person tale, the voice must be strong and compelling, and Ethan’s voice is neither.
Most of the 600 + pages are nothing but erect up after erect up… but lacking the sense of that erect *going* anywhere. By the time the book comes to its thought of a climactic conclusion, I was hard-pushed to care anymore. The characters had been too 2-dimensional for me throughout the tale. And the culmination of the entire plot of the tale? Are you *kidding* me? I reflect I’m *still* waiting for it!
Finally… The title? What’s the deal with the title? I don’t see how it applies to anything in the tale. Most times, there’s *some* kind of tie, even if a vague one, between the title and the tale. Frankly, I felt the title more appealing than the book.
Pass on this one, folks, unless you’re stuck at an airport between flights, and there’s a looooooong layover, that happens to time perfectly with the end of the book because you’ll be so glad to finally get on the plane that the anticlimactic ending won’t annoy you.
2:3 stars.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
It took some time to get past the first chapter or two. If you can hold out the tale starts to come together and gets appealing. Although it’s not full of your everyday head-chopping horror there is a bit of cult style drama invovled. It obviously wasn’t a very excellent book since I have only a vague memory of the main charcters. The part was too long to draw out all that happened. It would have been better served to shorten it and get to the point.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I was so incredibly excited to read this book. It seemed to be everything I delight in – YA, paranormal and long enough to last more than a night.
Sorry to say, it was too long. And the tale dragged on. And on and on and on, with nothing happening. I eventually had to start skimming yet to be to get to something excellent.
There is an incredible, and and suspensful tale hidden among the depths of gorgeous prose. I wish the book had all ears more tightly on the plot and the pacing.
I’m going to quote one of the additional reviewers who hit on one of my pet peeves. They worded it so perfectly:
“I initially liked that this tale was told from the point of view (except for an awkward section at the end) of a teenage boy. But, the number of times I was absolutely clear the narrator WAS a teenage boy were few…The voice in this book was so feminized and adult it was hard for me to remember the person doing the narrating should be a spotty, horny, bored, awkwardly bright kid, rather than the slickly defined construct of what a teen girl hopes a teenage boy would be.”
I like YA books from the male perspective. But immediately upon reading Gorgeous Creatures, I was aware that this was a male character written by an adult female. It felt off. And it really did feel like the viewpoint of what girls *hope* a teenage boy would be like, lacking really being like a teenage boy. I work with teenagers, and there are some fantastic young men out there. But they are still boys. Their thought process is different. Their perspective is different. This book could have easily switched Ethan and Lena’s roles lacking changing anything additional than the pronouns.
Overall, the book go way too slowly to hold my interest and even the excellent parts sprinkled throughout weren’t enough to redeem the endless pages where nothing happened.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5