Review: Beautiful Creatures

Back cover blurb (well, actually it's the Amazon blurb):
 There were no surprises in Gatlin County.
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that's what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.

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.

.....

Beautiful Creatures was recommended to me by my aunt.  I give it four out of five stars.

The biggest issue I had was that it was a romance.  But it was a pretty clean romance, which is always a plus.   I just like "Let's save the world!" plots more than "I love you and our parents will never keep us apart!" plots.  That being said, this was pretty good. I liked the characters, and there's a chance that the story will develop into a "let's save the world!" story in later books. (Though I'm not sure I'll read the rest of the series soon. I have a really big pile of books on my dresser that give me dirty looks every time I bring something home from the library.)  The writing itself was good, and there are some great plot twist.

Currently I'm reading The Dark Hills Divide, book 1 in the Land of Elyon series, by Patrick Carmen.  I'm over 100 pages in, and I still don't know what the plot is, but other than that it's pretty good. And it's short, so the plot is bound to show it's face soon.