Beautiful Creatures Discussion – Week 1

Here it is: the first BC discussion post! Here’s how the book discussions I’ve participated in usually do things: the post recaps the plot for that week’s chapters and ends with a few questions to get the discussion started. When you comment, you don’t have to answer any or all of the questions, and you can and should discuss anything from the chapters you want. The questions are just fodder and not meant to limit the conversation.

That said, here’s our standard disclaimer:

SPOILER WARNING: This post details the plot of the book Beautiful Creatures. If you have not read the book and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read any further.

Before: The Middle of Nowhere

The book begins with Ethan Lawson Wate introducing us to his town and his family. His father describes the people in the town:

There were only two kinds of people in our town. “The stupid and the stuck,” my father had affectionately classified our neighbors.

His father, a writer whose family had lived in Gatlin, SC, since the Civil War, divided the townsfolk into two camps: those “bound to stay” vs. those “too dumb to go.” Gatlin is a small town, stuck in their version of the past. Ethan’s family is different, made initially apparent by their refusal to use the common town euphemisms for the Civil War.

Everyone, that is, except my family. We called it the Civil War.

Tomorrow is the first day of Ethan’s sophomore year at Stonewall Jackson High, and, while he hopes something might be different, he’s sure it won’t be.

…I already knew everything that was going to happen – where I would sit, who I would talk to, the jokes, the girls, who would park where.

There were no surprises in Gatlin County. We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.

Of course, the minute you assume nothing will ever change, that’s when everything does.

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.

I never even saw it coming.

9.02: Dream On

Ethan has dreams, dark, vivid dreams about a girl he can’t see but who makes his heart race. On the first day of school, he dreams they’re falling, and he can’t catch her. There’s mud, then green sparks. But, in the end, he can’t save her.

There she slipped through my fingers, and all I could feel was loss.

Lemons and rosemary. I could smell her, even then.

But I couldn’t catch her.

And I couldn’t live without her.

The voice of Amma, the Wates’ housekeeper, wakes Ethan up. His window is open, and it’s raining outside. He thinks about his dream, which he’s been having for months. All he can ever remember is the girl and how much he doesn’t want to lose her.

It was like I was in love with her, even though I didn’t know her. Kind of like love before first sight.

He never sees or remembers seeing the girl’s face, but he knows that losing her made him sick inside.

As he gets up from the bed, he still has he iPod buds in his ears, and there’s a haunting song on it he doesn’t recognize: Sixteen Moons.

Sixteen moon, sixteen years
Sixteen of your deepest fears
Sixteen times you dreamed my tears
Falling, falling through the years…

When he gets up from bed, his sheets are full of and his fingernails caked with black mud…and it isn’t the first time it’s happened. Showering the mud away, he tries to forget the dream. He can’t forget it or the girl in it.

I was sixteen years old, I was falling in love with a girl who didn’t exist, and I was slowly losing my mind.

No matter how much he scrubs, he can still smell lemons and rosemary.

When he goes downstairs, Amma has made him breakfast. Amma is their housekeeper, but she’s also Ethan’s surrogate mother, having taken care of Ethan practically his whole life but especially after his mother’s death. A crossword fan, she has a penchant for spelling words when she uses them. Just like a parent, she feeds him to help him grow and scolds him about his appearance. Amma’s also superstitious, leaving charms and dolls around the house to ward off evil. She is the boss of the Wate house.

But Amma was anything but a mild-mannered old lady. She was the absolute authority in my house.

Ethan’s dad is a hermit, staying in his study night and day working on a new book, and has been since Ethan’s mother died the previous April. Ethan rarely sees him.

Ethan rides to school with his best friend Link (Wesley Jefferson Lincoln, ’cause you know we Southerners will use all three names the minute you’re in trouble *wink*). Since Link is the only one with a car, he drives them to school in his Beater, blasting music as he pulls in front of the house. The music is by Link’s band, Who Shot Lincoln, who are pretty horrible. Still, Link dreams of going to New York and becoming a famous musician. Ethan is envious, because he doesn’t really have a plan of his own.

I didn’t want to end up like my dad, living in the same house, in the same small town I’d grown up in, with the same people who had never dreamed their way out of here.

As they ride to school, past the old houses of town, Ethan asks Link if he put the strange song on his iPod, but Link doesn’t know what he’s talking about. When Link isn’t paying attention to the road, Ethan tells him to watch out for a car passing in front of him. It was a black hearse.

Maybe it was an omen. Maybe this year was going to be worse than I thought.

9.02: New Girl

Ethan and Link arrive late to school, passing the truant officer parked in front of the town’s only grocery store, and are soaked by the time they make it inside. Caught as they walk in, they’re given after-school detention.

The small town mentality of Gatlin extends to the school. Teachers have known all the students since practically birth, and they’ve already decided who the smart and stupid ones are. Ethan, who didn’t reread To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favorite books ever, btw) over the summer, fails his first quiz in English. Ethan loves to read, and he has a map on his bedroom wall where he marks places he’s read about and wants to visit.

In chemistry class, he’s made lab partners with Emily, who hasn’t liked him since they went to last year’s formal together and dumped him before the dance was even over. She is like all the other girls in Gatlin, and Ethan isn’t interested in any of Gatlin’s young ladies.

I wanted someone different, someone I could talk to about something other than parties and getting crowned at winter formal. A girl who was smart, or funny, or at least a decent lab partner.

Ethan’s history teacher is Mr. Lee, who apparently only teaches Civil War…um, I mean the War of Northern Aggression history. It’s in history class that Ethan first finds out about the new girl at school. He and Link hang out in the hall after class, hoping to see her. No such luck, and they go to their next class, American Sign Language, which they take along with the rest of the basketball team.

Basketball? Yep, that’s right. Ethan is a jock and has been since an eighth grade growth spurt (he’s 6’2″ now). He’s smart, emotional, athletic, and tall. *swoon* Oh, yeah, and sixteen *smacks self*…what was I saying?

The basketball team always sits together at lunch, and one of the other players says he’s seen the new girl.

Link asked the only question that mattered to any of them. “So, is she hot?”

“Pretty hot.”

“Savannah Snow hot?”

Savannah Snow is on the cheerleading team with Emily, and she is (at least in Gatlin) the epitome of the perfect girl. Leggy, blonde, and tan, Savannah is the cheerleading captain and one of the girls who formed the base of the team’s pyramid. Emily, on the other hand, was the top of the pyramid. Their respective positions on the pyramid mirror their positions in the social structure at the school.

When Emily got tossed, the pyramid went on fine without her. When Savannah moved an inch, the whole thing came tumbling down.

Ethan thoughts rest solely on the new girl, and he even wonders if she might be someone he’s dreamed about. Savannah and Emily fill everyone in on the new girl, letting them know that she’s not acceptable in their circle. Her clothes are all wrong, she’s pale, and she’s in the wrong family. The new girl is Old Man Ravenwood’s niece. Based on this information, Ethan decides that the new girl is probably not his dream girl.

Macon Melchizedek Ravenwood is Gatlin’s version of Boo Radley and lives in a run-down house on an old plantation. The new girl, his niece, moved in with him two days before. If nothing else about the new girl brands her a freak in the eyes of the clique, being related to Ravenwood certainly does.

That’s the thing I hate most about Gatlin. The way everyone had something to say about everything you said or did or, in this case, wore.

After school at basketball practice, Ethan plays flawlessly, able to sink every shot he throws. From the outside court, Ethan can see the entire parking lot, and he sees a black-haired girl looking at him from the driver’s seat of a black hearse. He misses his next shot. Other players on the team confirm that she is indeed the new girl. Almost as soon as the girl drives away, Ethan and the rest of the team are caught in a downpour.

The bad omen wasn’t just a hearse. It was a girl.

As he stands in the rain, Ethan gives up hope that this year will be any different than any other.

9.02: A Hole in the Sky

When Ethan arrives home, the dinner waiting for him is cold, Amma’s punishment for him being late for school. Amma’s pissed, and, as he eats his cold fried chicken (btw, there’s a lot to be said for some good, cold, leftover fried chicken *yum*) and mashed potatoes, Ethan apologizes and gets back on Amma’s good side. As they talk, Ethan mentions the new girl, who, of course, Amma already knows all about. Ethan finally gets a name.

Lena Duchannes. Pronounced, in the South, to rhyme with rain.

Amma warns Ethan not to mess with “things you don’t know anything about.” A respected tarot card reader from a long line of card readers, Amma often speaks in riddles. When Ethan asks her for more information about Lena, her response isn’t any more straightforward.

You watch yourself. One day you’re gonna pick a hole in the sky and the universe is gonna fall right through. Then we’ll all be in a fix.

As Ethan’s father emerges from the study for his nightly meal of coffee and Shredded Wheat, Ethan continues to ask Amma for information, which Amma continues to refuse to give him. When she speeds out the door, Ethan’s father asks Ethan what he’s done to her. Turns out Amma raised Ethan’s father. Their conversation is brief but nice before Ethan’s father returns to the grief that’s swallowed him since Ethan’s mother died.

The last five months had been hard for him. He had really loved my mother. But so had I.

As his father walks away, Ethan tries to pull him back, into conversation and into his life. He manages to ask his father about Macon Ravenwood, and his father says Macon is a recluse. Ethan realizes that Macon and his father have that in common. Ethan stops at the study door, remembering the one time, when he was seven, he went in and read his father’s manuscript. His father had been furious, and Ethan didn’t understand why his father kept himself shut off from him. He still doesn’t understand.

The next day at school, Lena is all anyone wants to talk about. The town gossip calling tree is in full force and stories, true or not, are circulating about Lena. The boys at basketball practice however, are only talking about the freshmen girls new to the dating pool. It started at the grocery store, were all the players were expect to meet on Wednesday mornings.

Finally, in the hall, he sees her:

But all I could see was a beautiful girl in a long gray dress, under a white track jacket with the word Munich sewn on it, and beat-up Converse peeking out underneath. … A girl who didn’t look like she belonged in Gatlin. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

When one of his teammates declares Lena off-limits because “she’s a freak,” Ethan confronts him. His teammate makes it clear that any interest in Lena would not be looked upon kindly in the halls of Jackson High. When Ethan walks into his English class, who does he find there? Lena, of course 🙂 And she catches Ethan staring at her.

The English class, taught by Mrs. English, has one rule: sit in the back. Mrs. English has one glass eye and can only see the front row. If you sit in the back, you don’t get called on. Lena, not knowing the rule, sits in the first row.

Emily walks in and immediately begins to taunt Lena, knocking over her back bag and taking Lena’s notebook. Before Lena has a chance to really get up in Emily’s face (come on, don’t act like I’m the only one that wanted to see a smackdown *wink*), Ethan retrieves the notebook, gives it back to Lena, and sits in the first row with her. At the end of class, Ethan turns to Lena, but she leaves the room without speaking. He notices what she has written on her hand: 156.

Despite feeling like maybe he shouldn’t , Ethan can’t stop thinking about Lena and sees her everywhere. He knows she doesn’t fit in and she’s not like everyone else. And still he thinks about her. He finally realizes why this bothers him:

It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn’t.

One day, as Ethan sits in ceramics class and attempts to mold clay, he hears a viola play the mysterious song he found on his iPod. The music is beautiful and haunting…and better than anything he’s every heard anyone in Gatlin play. When he imagines the words, however, they’re different in his head. The room begins to spin wildly around him, and, suddenly, he’s inside his nightmare, struggling to hold onto the mysterious girl’s wrist but losing his grip…

The teacher’s voice brings him back to the room, and he notices a girl’s hand has been smashed into the clay on his wheel. He knows the hand is hers. Running to the music room, Ethan rushes to find out who was playing the music. He smells lemons and rosemary. He asks the music teacher who he’d heard playing, and, before she can finish her sentence about the new girl and say the name, he runs away.

After classes, Ethan borrows Link’s car. He knows the only person he could have told about the girl, the music, and the visions was his mother, and, absent her, he’s on his own. Link’s keys in hand, he ignores Link’s warnings about missing practice and angering Amma.

His hand wavered as I grabbed the keys. “Don’t be stupid.”

I turned and bolted. Too late.

Food for thought

1. I grew up in what’s considered a big city for Alabama, but I certainly had my share of experiences with the small towns around us. If you’re from the South, do you think the book’s portrayal of a small Southern town is valid? If you’re not from the South, how does Gatlin compare to the small towns where you’re from?

2. Ethan says he hates that everyone in Gatlin judges people, but he does the same thing himself when he writes off the new girl the first day in the lunchroom. When he finally sees her, however, she’s all he can think about. How hard will it be for him to face the disapproval of everyone if he pursues Lena? Would it be any different if they were in college or adults?

3. You’ve now seen mine & Greta’s Ethan – who’s your Ethan? (P.S. Next week you get to see our Lena.)

Okay, folks, comment away!  🙂

~ by fragile little human on 24 January 2010.