Beautiful Creatures; Blackberry Winter; The Searchers

I wasn't too impressed with "Beautiful Creatures" by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. It's a rather melodramatic Gothic YA romance set in the deep South. Ethan is smitten with the new girl in town, Lena, who is living with her uncle Mason, the town recluse. Lena is a Castor--a witch, basically. In Lena's family, everyone is Claimed at the age of 16 by either the Dark or the Light. Lena has always been told she's had no choice in which side claims her, and she's terrified of going Dark like her cousin Ridley did the year before. The kids at school are giving her a hard time because they realize she's different, even though they don't realize just how different. When her sixteenth birthday comes, Lena discovers she does actually have some sort of choice in the matter: if she chooses Light, her beloved uncle Mason will die and she won't be able to have a future with Ethan, because Castors and Mortals can't be together. If she chooses Dark, however, she can be with Ethan, although she probably won't want to. Before she can choose, however, the moon disappears. No moon, no claiming. Lena has another year to decide what to do. I'll probably get around to reading the rest of the series, but I'm not clamoring for it.

"Blackberry Winter" by Sarah Jio was pretty good, if a bit unrealistic. Claire is still mourning the loss of her newborn the previous year, and her marriage to wealthy newspaper magnate Ethan is deteriorating. Claire turns to her journalism to help heal the pain, and decides to write a story about a young boy named Daniel Ray who disappeared from Seattle 80 years earlier during a freak spring snowstorm. Claire's story is interwoven with Vera Ray's, young Daniel's distraught mother. It was sad, and totally improvable, but it had a nice, sweet ending.

"The Searchers" by Glenn Frankel was really great, I was impressed by how much I enjoyed it. Frankel starts out by telling the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by Comanches when she was nine years old. Her surviving male relatives search for her, but have to give up after awhile. Twenty-four years later, Texas Rangers "rescued" Cynthia Ann from the band of Comanches she was living with and returned her to her white relatives. Heartbroken over the loss of her family and wanting desperately to go back to her Comanche husband and sons, Cynthia died not long afterwards. Frankel then moves on to tell the story of her surviving son, Quanah Parker, who became a famous Indian chief. After Quanah's death in 1911, Frankel moves to the story of Alan LeMay, a novelist who wrote a book based on Cynthia Ann's experience called "The Searchers". John Ford turned it into a famous Western starring John Wayne. Frankel finishes up the book by talking about Quanah's descendants, who still honor him with a festival every year. It was very nicely done and quite fascinating.