:: Literal Impressions ~ September ::

Book: Beautiful Creatures
Author: Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Publisher: Puffin
Opinion:
Ethan Wate lives in the town of Jackson * (?) in Gatlin County. “The Middle of Nowhere”. To paraphrase; it has no Starbucks, no McDonald’s and no movie theatre.
A small, simple town. Nothing ever happened there.
“There were no surprises in Gatlin.”
Heh… Famous last words.
As luck would have it – a new girl comes to town.
Lena Duchannes – the hottest thing to hit Gatlin since Savannah Snow.
To say her arrival causes a storm is a joke as well as a colossal understatement.
Through a series of events, we come to find a lot of secrets, a lot deceit and a lot of bad decisions made with the best intentions. Quite a bit of Jackon’s history comes to light, culminating in a big showdown in the final chapters. However, we’re still left with a fairly open ending, as there will indeed be a sequel – much to my delight.
The characters are quite believable and some of the minor characters are given decent development, giving the story, (and town) pretty good depth. I personally loved the aunts with their stubbornness and southern dialect. Having survived multiple husbands each, they’re quite endearing in their charming old fashioned mannerisms.
I also loved Ravenwood Manor and its mysterious presence, if you could call it that.
The sequel, “Beautiful Darkness” comes out sometime mid-to-late next month, in the states – hopefully it will come out here shortly after.
Great debut novel for this team of authors!

A little warning: Do :NOT: under any state of curiosity download “Sixteen Moons” from the official site. It almost killed the version I imagined in my head.

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Book: The Iron King
Author: Julie Kagawa
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Opinion:
Tragedy hit Meghan Chase very early in her life.
On her sixth birthday, she was in the park with her father. The ice-cream truck came and her father gave her some money to get one. When she returned, he was gone. The only vestige was his pair of shoes, at the edge of the large pond. The police searched high and low, scouring every inch of the pond. His body was never found. He just disappeared.
Her mother moved them to a small town in the middle of the Louisiana bayou. She met Luke, re-married and had another child.
Meghan always caught glimpses of things in her peripheral vision. A shadow here, a disappearing something there.
On her sixteenth birthday, her little brother, Ethan, is kidnapped. But something else is left in his place, something not quite human.
Suddenly her world is turned upside.
What she thought were figments of her imagination, turn out to be real creatures, living in our world. Her brother, as it turns out, has been kidnapped by faeries.
Meghan vows to travel into Faery and get him back.

Bam bam baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamm…

I found this book quite enjoyable and the writing easy to get into, though at a few points it was a tad predictable to me (knowing so much about mythological creatures can have its down side).
The characters were well developed although I get so exasperated with the main character because I forget sometimes not everyone knows the idiosyncrasies in faerie tales.
This seems to be a recurring situation with teen books where I’ll get annoyed at the characters for acting as ignorantly as sixteen-or-thereabout year olds act their age.

At one point, I was quite shocked to see some strong swearing yet the fact that the character wasn’t ‘quite there’ is clearly stated. Still I had to keep reminding myself.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed it and am curious to see how the small fleeting romance that is blossoming between two of the main characters develops, but I shall not give anything away. I felt a bit sad in the end because, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of a certain character but I’ve got the feeling that we’ll get a little more history in the coming books.

You can find the ‘trailer’ on Harlequin Book’s YouTube page.

Four out of five.

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