Beautiful Disaster

“I know we're fucked up, alright? I'm impulsive, and hot tempered, and you get under my skin like no one else. You act like you hate me one minute, and then need me the next. I never get anything right, and I don't deserve you...but I fucking love you, Abby. I love you more than I loved anyone or anything ever. When you're around, I don't need booze, or money, or the fighting, or the one-night stands...”

This pretty much sums it up.

(Review originally posted here at Fictionally Inclined.)

I have struggled with how to go about this review. I had pretty much planned on simply not reviewing if a book was anything less than “okay” for me. BUT. I have decided this book is an exception, if only because I, personally, felt incredibly misled about it. I want to do a review so others don't go into it expecting something else like I did. I saw a couple glowing reviews and the high Goodreads rating, read the summary, thought “Older young adult romance! They're actually in college! SCORE!” and marked it as to-read. Then I (eventually) read it. There are very few books I disliked so much by the end that I wanted to throw them across the room. This was one of them.

If you get nothing else from this review, get this: Beautiful Disaster is NOT a romance. I really want to stress this point. I have seen it portrayed as a twisted but passionate and beautiful love story. That's even how it tries to present itself. And trust me, I love a good twisted love story. You want romance? I can give you romance. I can give you Good Girl/Bad Boy romance. This book? Not romance. The “love story” in Beautiful Disaster is a hot mess of dysfunction, codependency, and psychological, emotional, and borderline physical abuse.

You may have noticed (especially if reading this on Goodreads) that I rated this book 2 stars. If I hated it so much, why not 1 star? Honestly, there were parts in the beginning that I did enjoy, before the red flags started popping up all over the place. And even with that, the story was interesting in its own way. I really think I would have enjoyed Beautiful Disaster a lot more if I had gone into it knowing what it actually was. Perhaps “enjoyed” is not quite the right word...maybe “appreciated.” I would have been in the right mindset. I wouldn't have felt tricked and cheated. I've read very good books about unhealthy relationships in the past (Stay by Deb Caletti and Dreamland by Sarah Dessen, among others). I would not put this among them, but I certainly could view it as a much better book if looking from the perspective of a cautionary tale about what to avoid in relationships, rather than a portrayal of a swoon-worthy romance for which you should long.

On the technical side, there were also quite a few grammatical mistakes; a more intense editing process was definitely needed before publishing.


❝The more he smiled, the more I wanted to hate him, and yet it was the very thing that made hating him impossible.❞

❝I had died and woken up in High School Musical.❞

I livetweeted the experience of reading this, and I should probably gather those up into some kind of archive for posterity.

But basically how I feel about this book is



Like how people complain about Twilight and say it's so terrible and it's an unhealthy relationship and the dialogue is bad blah blah blah...

NOPE

Twilight is a paragon compared to this.

Like

I can't even

Bad Boy Travis LITERALLY throws Good Girl Abby over his shoulder and carries her out of a party because he sees her dancing with another dude AFTER she broke up with him for being a craycray stalker.

Flames on the side of my face!!!!!!!!

Oh also I have not read 50 Shades of Grey but I've seen people compare this to 50 Shades. Granted I have not read all of 50 Shades but I think 50 Shades might be a BETTER relationship scenario cuz at least that girl got some kind of contract? Also the sex in Beautiful Disaster is very “fade to black” and not sexy.