Beautiful Creatures - Garcia & Stohl - 2009 - YA Lit Week 9

Title: Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles # 1)

Author: Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Year: 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Course Theme for the Week: Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction & Fantasy (03-30-2011)

Date Read: 03-26-2011

Overall: * * * 1/2 (3.5/5)

GoodReads Blurb: Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

My Review: I read this book as one of my two Fantasy books for my YA Lit course. I really only chose it out of convenience, since a friend of mine owned it and I didn't feel like making the trek out to the library or a store to find some of the others on the list. I spent a nice Saturday home lounging on the couch and reading this book. I was surprised with how much I enjoyed the story.

I liked the writing of Garcia & Stohl, it felt very smooth and the language didn't feel like there were two authors. The plot was alright, I'm not a big fan of "supernatural" or "paranormal" things, because I find it really difficult to get past the fact that I don't believe in any of those things, but for the most part I was able to see beyond that in this story. Ethan and Lena made a nice pair, and I felt like I understood why Lena was such a roller coaster mess half the time, it felt very believable.

I did have a few problems with this, though. First, I don't really understand that sudden change when Ethan decided that Lena should be called "L" constantly... L isn't really an initial I think works as a nickname. At all. It just felt forced, and like whoever was typing up the novel got a little lazy. Second, Ethan didn't really make sense as a boy. I mean... he seemed very much like a girl. Maybe Garcia & Stohl just aren't very good at convincingly writing from the male perspective. I don't mean the writing was bad, it just felt like I was reading from a girl's perspective the whole time. Third, I felt like Lena's "caster" family members were very typical. I knew from the first family gathering that one of them would be secretively "dark" and that their relationships would play out as they did.

This book didn't make me want to run out and grab the second in the series, but I did enjoy my Saturday reading it. I have borrowed the second one to read when I have time, though I have been told I might not enjoy it as much as the first. We'll see!

To Purchase: Amazon, B&N

Also by these authors: Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles # 2) (2010), Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles # 3) (coming in 2011)

Stolen - Christopher - 2009

Title: Stolen

Author: Lucy Christopher

Year: 2009

Publisher: Chicken House

Date Read: 03-19-2011

Overall: * * * * * (5/5)

GoodReads Blurb: Sixteen year old Gemma is kidnapped from Bangkok airport and taken to the Australian Outback. This wild and desolate landscape becomes almost a character in the book, so vividly is it described. Ty, her captor, is no stereotype. He is young, fit and completely gorgeous. This new life in the wilderness has been years in the planning. He loves only her, wants only her. Under the hot glare of the Australian sun, cut off from the world outside, can the force of his love make Gemma love him back? The story takes the form of a letter, written by Gemma to Ty, reflecting on those strange and disturbing months in the outback. Months when the lines between love and obsession, and love and dependency, blur until they don't exist - almost.

Plot: * * * * *

Characters: * * * * *

Style: * * * *

My Review: This was a really original story line. The story is written as a letter from Gemma to Ty, her captor. The language felt a bit strange at first, but I think that's because the author is from Wales and has lived in Australia. I really liked reading the story from Gemma's point of view, because I felt confused right along with her.

Both Gemma and Ty were really well developed characters. Gemma's flashbacks to home and to her friends showed both how much she missed home and show she had mixed feelings about the relationships she had with people there. Ty wasn't really raised by either of his parents and feels only a connection with the land and to Gemma, so he tried to bring the two together to live in a perfect little bubble in the outback. I think Ty's problems all stem from his childhood and that he honestly meant well the whole time, but did not understand the correct way to "save" people.

This may be the minority opinion, I'm not really sure, but I kind of wanted Gemma and Ty to live together in the Australian Outback forever. I still can't decide if Gemma had stockholm syndrome or not, because I was falling in love Ty as she sort of was, too. It was obviously awful that he kidnapped and drugged her, because he took away her ability to decide for herself, but I really felt for him and his upbringing (or lack of).

Maybe Lucy Christopher just wrote it so well that as I reader I got stockholm syndrome, I don't know. But the part of Ty that wasn't manipulative was really sweet and caring, and I felt that he just wanted to show Gemma real beauty and to save her from the shallowness of her life before.

I should also add that I do not condone kidnapping, unless it's in a work of fiction, then I'm cool with it.

To Purchase: Amazon, B&N

Also by this author: Flyaway (coming Oct 2011)

Currently Reading: Beautiful Creatures by Garcia & Stohl, and Keturah and Lord Death by Leavitt

Books Read in 2011: 30 (or 100)

Stitches - Small - 2009

Title: Stitches: A Memoir (Graphic Novel)

Author: David Small

Year: 2009

Publisher: Norton

Course Theme for the Week: Biography & Non-Fiction (03-23-2011)

Date Read: 03-22-2011

Overall: * * * * * (5/5)

GoodReads Blurb: One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.

In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.

Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.

Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statement.

A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again.

My Review: Stitches is beautifully illustrated. The images in the story convey so much emotion, and a large number of the pages don't even have any text. I was surprised that the pages without text were my favorite, but I think it is because I was able to linger longer on those pages, trying to figure out their meaning and what part of the story they were telling.

There are a number of images in this story that are actually fairly horrifying. The "little man in the jar," in particular. I think one of my favorite panels of images was the rain scene towards the end. There is rain in the city, on the car, the view out the window, on the lawnmower, and the inside of the kitchen looks dim and lonely. I think David Small does a wonderful job with faces, showing with just a few lines the exact expression you can picture someone making.

David's story is not a happy story, though the ending is full of hope. Seeing the illustrations that match his emotions when he discovered his father had given him cancer through x-rays was, at times, really hard to look at, because I didn't want to believe that could happen and then that they wouldn't even tell him the truth about his surgery.

To Purchase: Amazon, B&N

Also by this author: Imogene's Antlers (1985), Ruby Mae Has Something to Say (1992)

Books read in 2011: 28

Currently Reading: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl (2009)