Beautiful Creatures by Garcia & Stohl

Beautiful Creatures
by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Little, Brown (Dec. 2009)
576 pages
YA Supernatural Fiction
Winner of the William C. Morris YA Debut Award
Source: My friend Kim foisted this on me so she could have someone to discuss it with :)

Summary in a Sentence:

In a small South Carolina town, where it seems little has changed since the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Ethan is powerfully drawn to Lena, a new classmate with whom he shares a psychic connection and whose family hides a dark secret that may be revealed on her sixteenth birthday.

My thoughts:

I have extremely mixed feelings over this tome of a young adult novel. I usually make the effort to put some distance between a new release with this much hype and my reading of said novel. Unfortunately, I did not give myself enough time with Beautiful Creatures. The book was simply talked up way too much for me to possibly enjoy it as much as I was hoping I would.  Here's my bulleted list of irksome findings:

• I found Ethan, the male love interest, to be very feminine and not much like most sixteen year old guys I know or have ever known. Women authors have been known to write believable male characters and vice versa, but Garcia & Stohl did not hit the nail on the head with this one.
• I think I'm a little burned out on the whole supernatural-I'm-mortal-but-the-one-I-love-isn't-what-will-we-ever-do? theme in young adult literature. Did anyone else feel like this was just Bella and Edward in reverse, just a little bit? 

Not everything is bad here, I promise! I love that it was set in the south (South Carolina, to be exact), that libraries feature so prominently in the book (not just regular libraries but secret occult libraries as well), and that the Civil War is also a main topic in the novel. Many citizens in Ethan's small town of Gatlin, South Carolina, still seemed to be fighting for the Cause with a capital 'C'. For librarians out there, teen readers of Twilight and supernatural series in general will definitely be into this one.

~ Read for the 4 Month Challenge ~

Other reviews:

• Good Books & Good Wine 
• Dog-eared and well-read 
• The Hiding Spot
  

The Confederate General Rides North by Amanda Gable

The Confederate General Rides North
by Amanda Gable
Scribner, August 2009
276 pages
Fiction
Personal Copy

Summary in a Sentence:

 Eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell, who is fascinated by stories of the Civil War generals, jumps at the chance to take a trip with her mother and drive north of their Georgia home in search of antiques, battlefields, and historic sites, but each stop causes Kat to question her understanding of war and her faith in her mother.

My Thoughts:

I had never heard of this book before attending the Southern Festival of Books in nearby Nashville last October. I love my yearly trek to Tennessee's capital to discover new authors each year, and Amanda Gable is quite a discovery, indeed. I found it very easy to relate with protagonist Katherine McConnell since I also grew up in the South as a fairly dorky, history buff kinda kid who had some conflicting emotions about the South's checkered past in the areas of slavery and civil rights. This book tackles these subjects and more with aplomb.

As Katherine and her mother travel further North and Katherine begins to sense that something is not quite right, Katherine uses her love of Civil War history to cope with her personal difficulties and misgivings. The author conveys this in italicized sections where Katherine pretends to be a general fighting her own war, which is what Katherine is essentially doing. Katherine is fighting a personal war over her ideas about what it means to be a Southerner, but she is also fighting a familial war with her mother who has been overtaken with her mental illness. Also going on in the novel, which is set in 1968, are the political and cultural events surrounding civil rights that seemed to reach a fever pitch that year.

One aspect of the novel I particularly loved was Katherine's love of books, especially the biographies of famous people in American history. There is one particular set that I read as a child; my favorite was the biography of Florence Nightingale.

For fans of Southern fiction, as well as those interested in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the effects of mental illness on families.

~ This book counts towards the Random Reading Challenge ~

You might also like:

• Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven
• What Girls Learn by Karin Cook
• Shiloh: A Novel by Shelby Foote