Beautiful Disaster - Jamie McGuire
7:28 PM
Perhaps I'm a little bit late to review this book, because I know for a fact that most people have read it already, but I think it's time I share my very unpopular opinion on it. Most won't agree, I'm aware, but hey, we've all got different opinions, right?
I'm talking about Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire. Yup, probably the most popular erotica/romance NA novel after Fifty Shades of Grey, and even if I share an unpopular opinion, I do still believe that it is ten times better than Fifty Shades (you may have noticed I have never written a review on that one, and trust me, it's better this way).
Eastern Freshman Abby Abernathy is 18 years old when she meets Travis "Mad Dog" Maddox at a fight. Cashmere cardigans, ponytails, very unflattering sweatpants; she's incredibly smart, but she's also no one's type. However, when she continues to run into Travis at school, lunch, and home, you can easily guess that she suddenly become his type.
Travis, professional underground fighter and Eastern manwhore, is 21 when Abby catches his eye. While girls fall at his feet constantly, Abby has no intention of getting in bed with him. Not even when she loses a bet and has to actually sleep in his bed for over a month.Until this point, it's the typical church girl slash bad boy relationship. Travis drives a motorcycle and Abby is still a virgin. Travis this and Abby that. But they meet in the first chapter and by the third one, they've already become best friends. There is absolutely no character/storyline development, and from the beginning, you know that Travis is secretly in love with Abby even though he barely knows her. From a reader's point of view, it doesn't feel like love at all, but more like the bad boy wants to win something by conquering the good girl, which in this case is bad because it wasn't Jamie McGuire's intention for readers to feel this way. Something is missing.
Another reason why this book hasn't reached my expectations is the writing. Not only is the book badly written and edited (awful punctuation, short sentences, awkward syntax), the story was made for a 150,000-word book, massacred into 100,000. There is nothing more annoying than reading "He said this. I smiled. He said that" instead of Jane Austen-like sentences. I mean, fine, we can't all be Jane Austen, but a little bit of meat on the bone never hurts!
If you thought that was all, you're wrong. One last thing that had me rolling my eyes was the overly predictable ending. Spoiler alert: they get married. I'm not saying that it's particularly bad, because getting married at the end of a 200,000-word book spread over a couple of years is more than acceptable, but getting married after, what, three months? Nope. *Shaking my head* This is exactly why I probably won't even bother reading the sequel.
Realistically, this book deserves a 4/5 for the romance part of it, because I won't deny that you get sucked in despite the major flaws. However, if we take every detail into consideration, and if you're a grammar freak like I am, it gets a very generous 3/5.
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