the beautiful creatures complete collection

The parameters were neatly explained, they treat their teen readers with respect- apparently they had a few teens go through and cut out 'cheese' and generally act as betas, which served them well. Will have to ask a few teens what they thought. Her constant smack talk was tiresome- but again I'm older than the target audience, so for all I know she's a dream character for your average teen girl. Ridley, the evil cousin, played by Emmy Rossum in the movie, was hard to get a bead on. That said, I'm not the target audience, so if I scoffed at the ease with which Ethan communicated his need for the river's eye to Lena and the way he got it from her from beyond the grave, where the Book of Moons retrieval turned out to be way more complicated, well, I'm a cynical old broad. The ending was less saccharine than I expected- having the protagonist die and then come back from the Otherworld might have been cloying if it weren't worked out so well.

Sarafine got a bit of forgiveness at the end, but she still had to go. I liked that the character deaths were justified and made sense- Lena's mother, Abraham, and Hunting didn't need to be redeemed and the authors wisely didn't try. Who just happens to be supernatural and conflicted. I liked that they tried, though, and that the protagonist was a boy: Rather than have an odd girl move into town and fall in love with a local boy, they flipped the script and had the local boy woo the new girl in town.

So in general, the Lena POV portions rang truer for me. Ethan says he wants to get out of Gatlin, but boyfriend doesn't really say where he'd rather go or what he'd do- which weakened his characterization considerably and makes him a bit of a lame duck protagonist. I know it's teen Goth, and I know that teen boys can be very soulful creatures, but Ethan knew a little to much about clothing, was a little too chaste, and a little too vague.

I'd give it a 5, but Garcia and Stohl really didn't get Ethan's voice quite right, imo.

And it was a surprisingly enjoyable read. (Call it research- I'm writing a teen supernatural romance.) The fact that the movie was supposed to come out about 2 weeks after I got the first book was a good impetus to speed through the whole series. I was looking for something light after reading something a bit more srs bsns than I'm used to, and the first book in the series was only about $7 on Kindle Fire, so I snagged it. I'm late to the party but I still read this series.

The beautiful creatures complete collection