REVIEW: Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

Pub. Date: May 26th 2011 (eBook) August 14th 2012 (paperback)
Publisher: Atria
Pages: 432
Readership: Young adult / adult
Genres: contemporary, romance, chicklit

The new Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate percentage of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance between her and the darkness of her past, but when she arrives at college with her best friend, her path to a new beginning is quickly challenged by Eastern University's Walking One-Night Stand. 

Travis Maddox, lean, cut, and covered in tattoos, is exactly what Abby needs—and wants—to avoid. He spends his nights winning money in a floating fight ring, and his days as the ultimate college campus charmer. Intrigued by Abby’s resistance to his appeal, Travis tricks her into his daily life with a simple bet. If he loses, he must remain abstinent for a month. If Abby loses, she must live in Travis’s apartment for the same amount of time. Either way, Travis has no idea that he has met his match.

Beautiful Disaster is not my usual cuppa tea. I like contemporary but generally I stick to fantasy, sci-fi or dystopia. Beautiful Disaster is far from any of those things but still I took a chance on it. I'm a sucker for the bad boy story, what can I say.

One of the things that I liked about Beautiful Disaster is that it is well written. I've seen a few reviews that state otherwise and I can see where they are coming from but I do not believe that is the case. Beautiful Disaster is told in first person. The narrator is Abby Abernathy, a 19 year old woman. With that in mind, I think the writing style is realistic. It's from her viewpoint, her mind. She's fresh to college; trying to start a new life, trying to get away from her past. I don't think any of us would think so eloquently in that time of our life, especially with all that Abby went through and is going through.

That said, Abby is a hard one to get a grip on. At first I was very fond of her. She seemed like someone you might know in real life. She has a bit of a dark past that she doesn't want to shed any light on, but she's fun and caring and everything you'd want in a friend. But when she met Travis, and as their relationship rolled along, she became a little intolerable. Her constant see-sawing when it came to Travis and her feelings nearly drove me nuts. I saw where she was coming from most times, but it still grated my nerves. I loved their beginning. I loved how they were friends but there was this thing between them, this unmistakeable sexual chemistry where you just knew they would end up in each other's pants. But it dragged on and dragged on and Abby got completely hair-pullingly aggravating. But like I said, the more she see-sawed, the more I became annoyed with her.

Travis is another story. I really, really liked him. He's your typical bad boy: he has a short fuse, he is covered in tattoos, he will totally mess someone up if they so much as look at him or someone he loves the wrong way, even by a fraction but deep down he has a bigger heart than most people. There were times that he also annoyed me but they came far less Abby's annoyances. Some of his actions were rash, some of them definitely overboard, boarding on completely ridiculous but I guess that comes with the kind of relationship that Abby and Travis had.

At times, reading Beautiful Disaster felt like reading a soap opera. Events, odd but memorable character names, and even Travis and Abby's relationship to an extent paralleled even the most ludicrous of soaps but at the same time, I couldn't put it down. One way or another, Beautiful Disaster is a gripping roller coaster ride that will leave you breathless until the very last page. I'm excited to read Walking Diaster, which is this book but told from Travis's POV.

★★★

I liked it

*Thanks to Simon and Schuster for providing a copy for review!!*

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