Beautiful Creatures
Beautiful Creatures - Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
I was alerted to this excellent YA fantasy by a little flyer that came in some mailing the bookstore received. I'm extremely happy I took the time to look the books up on amazon, as this is one of the best books I've read recently. 600+ pages of magic.
Plot:
Ethan Wake lives in the small Southern town of Gatlin and wants out. He keeps dreaming of a girl who smells like lemon and rosemary, whom in the dream he loves. Then he meets Lena Duchannes, the niece of the town shut-in (who has a dog named Boo Radley), a strange gothlike sort of girl who just wants to be normal, because she is a [spell]Caster, just developing her powers. Ethan and Lena of course fall in love, and then get caught up in complicated family relations and a curse going back to the Civil War involving their ancestors. Ethan is dealing with the recent loss of his mother, and his father is extremely depressed. Their cook, Amma, seems to know voudou-like magic and to have some kind of past with Lena's family. Ethan's best friend Link wants to promote his rock band. The fashionable clique at Jackson High turns the whole school against Lena. Link's mother tries to have her expelled. Lena's cousin, a Dark Caster, shows up to mess with people. Everybody consults libraries. Ghosts appear to the couple. They have visions of Lena's ancestor during Sherman's march to the sea. Questions are raised about Lena's dead parents. Is Macon Ravenwood, Lena's uncle, on Lena's side or is he hiding things from her? Everything ends on Lena's 16th birthday, when the family curse is supposed to take effect and she will be forced to turn good or evil - but she doesn't know which.
I was just caught up in this world for 626 pages. The incredible number of plot threads do basically come together and get resolved, albeit in a slightly ambiguous way. I wasn't quite sure whether there was going to be a sequel, but according to the author interview on amazon, there is, and that's probably why it's a little ambiguous (including mysterious songs on ipods). This is an incredibly good book, with lots of imagination, and I recommend it highly.
Race in the South in the book (a major digression):
Ethan's family is positioned right away as the Yankee sympathizer family, who won't fly the Confederate flag and fight against the banning of books. The town's obsession with the Southern cause as a positive thing is portrayed as part of what is keeping the town in the past, and narrow-minded. The Wate family cook, Amma, is a Seer, and practices positively-portrayed voudou-type magic. It's a little scary, but it's been used to protect Ethan for years. Ethan originally looks down at her a little for being superstitious, but that is before he is thrown into the midst of an entire secret culture of magic-users. Amma is basically Ethan's nanny, I'm avoiding the word mammy, since his mom is dead and his father incommunicado in his study due to grief, and she protects his family with magic out of love - but she has a strong personality, and spends a lot of the book being one of the opposing forces to Lena & Ethan's love, because of Lena's family, before she is finally convinced to help at the end (where she does not take part in the magical battle but provides psychological support for Lena at a crucial point, and casts a spell with her).
Amma is one of the two black characters in the book (three if you count Ivy in flashbacks), which I ascertained through careful study, as Garcia and Stohl have decided to go the route of not naming anybody's race, and sticking short physical descriptions in odd places a while after the characters are introduced. This has been criticized as leading to the assumption that everybody in the book is white when people miss the short physical descriptions. In this case it caused me to spend a lot of the book trying to figure out if Amma was black, since she has a heavy accent and is associated with voudou, but I'm used to having more physical description.
The other black character is Marian the librarian, a professor who was Ethan's mother's co-author. She has no accent, has a more prominent physical description (as opposed to Amma, who really doesn't have any physical description) and isn't quite a main character; she comes into the plot late, and is prohibited by certain magic rules from officially helping or hindering anybody, although she helps Ethan and Lena as much as she can.
It's weird for me to throw around accusations of being a Magical Negro. Would the character be mad? Would the authors be mad? If a minor supporting character is black, are they automatically a Magical Negro, since they don't do much but support? Are you supposed to assume black characters are Magical Negros and prove they're not? In other words, assume blacks have a lower place in books. Or are you supposed to assume black characters are not Magical Negros and prove that they are? In other words, give the burden of proof to the people who are possibly sinned against, the presumably black people who complain. Some kind of assumption can be shown either way. I think the best solution to this is to be aware of your assumptions (which is what everybody says anyway), and to judge each work on an individual basis. Which very much begs the question, how?
I'm going to say writing quality and characterization help the work. If you're not that great at writing, it's easier to fall into writing stereotypes. I'm going to say cynicism hinders judgment of the work, just as it hinders any judgment. It's too easy to get cynical, no matter where your biases are. It's better to stay open-minded, which is what a lot of YA literature is about anyway. Outsiders and acceptance.
I'm going to say this book is well-written, and is trying to mess around with assumptions and stereotypes. That's why the book doesn't name anybody's race and why the authors mess around with the mammy archetype/stereotype, which Amma isn't, although she could have been. The messing around works at least somewhat, since it got me thinking about race in the book and in literature. I certainly *hope* it's not going to make younger black readers think their people aren't in the book.
Why examine? Well, in the light of recent controversy it's probably good to check one's assumptions, which includes analyzing things one likes. Secondly, on a purely realpolitik level, it's good to analyze something before you go out and say it's wonderful and everyone should read it. Otherwise you can end up embarrassed. Thirdly, some people are going to analyze anyway, whether it's their nature (like mine) or because the subject of race comes up too often for them to find peace of mind.
These are the best thoughts I can come up with the moment. As always, discussion is welcome. Hey, this is a reading discussion community.