Fictional Travel Literature: Beautiful Creatures

Beautiful Creatures
Written by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

The premise: A tale of star crossed lovers that has a mix of fairy tale and reality check. Gatlin isn’t a town you could locate on a map of South Carolina, it is a real place. The small town is a mixture of backward thinking and supernatural power, and as far as the protagonist Ethan knows Gatlin is insulated and isolated–forever unchanging. However when Lena Duchannes moves to town Ethan finds that the town he knew so well and that he has desperately wanted to escape from has been keeping secrets of the magical variety from him.

Travel Angle: The first book takes place entirely in Gatlin, which is a fictitious town in South Carolina. Even though the characters don’t go anywhere, the reader does. Through the writing the reader can map out the town, sit down to eat a Southern feast prepared by cook of Gullah ancestry and romp through a library that simultaneously exists below the DAR building and beyond the borders of the small town.

My favorite detail in this book was that Ethan keeps a map of places he wants to go from books he’s read, marking off places with pins. Being a collector of random travel souvenirs I wanted to visit the supernatural library so I could get a library card from it.

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