I think I should stop reading books about witches...I can’t think of anything I liked about Beautiful Creatures. I didn’t find the story that interesting, the writing was bad, the characters weren’t likeable. I can’t even say it was that easy to read. I managed to finish it, but only because halfway through I stopped trying to understand what was happening. Beautiful Creatures has two authors, and I think a lot of the problems in the book stem from this. Beautiful Creatures is both over and under written. There are so many scenes filled with needless details (why do I need to know about Link’s wallet chain? Oh, I don’t), and then later in the story, details pop up that were never mentioned before (When is it mentioned that Lena has a birthmark on her face? Once, about two paragraphs after it becomes an important detail). The descriptions overall were not well written and I had a lot of trouble understanding what was happening in several scenes.There is also way way too much special snowflake syndrome and hating on “other girls” going on in the book. Lena is different from all the other girls. She wears converse and doesn’t wear makeup. All the other girls are mean and wear short skirts and carry small metallic purses! (Those other girls also look skanky in tank tops and baby ts… if that’s all it takes to be a “skank” then I don’t know a single... not skank.) Seriously? I mean, the whole “other girls” trope needs to die. It is lazy writing, and bad storytelling. Are the other girls in the story terrible? Yes. Are the other boys in the story terrible? Yes. Yet there aren’t any moral aspersions cast on the male characters. They are terrible because of their actions. The girls are terrible because of their actions, but also because they care about their appearances.The structure also didn’t work for me. The book is way too long for the story it’s telling. A large portion of the book is dedicated to flashbacks. The problem is, there’s no real surprise at the end of the flashbacks. It’s just a really long way to explain something the reader and the characters already know.My last complaint is the basketball. Ethan plays basketball. He talks about basketball a lot. And while none of the basketball in the book is technically wrong (unlike the authors’ apparent belief that nothing will remove sharpie from skin), none of it feels right either. It feels like something they maybe know a little bit about (or researched a tiny bit) and then included in the book as a “boy” detail so their boy main character felt more like a boy. (I thought Ethan was a girl when I started reading the book.)Beautiful Creatures could have been a good story, if the authors could have figured out a better way to write together and if their editor had been more liberal with the cuts. Unless you’re really into YA supernatural romance stories set in the south with large Civil War subplots, I’d skip this one.
