Beautiful Disaster
Ratings117
Average rating3.2
I watched the movie first and LOVED it so was excited to read this. I know movie adaptions are never the same & books are usually better, but in this case — the movie was better 🤷🏻♀️
objectively this was not a great book. but subjectively... i ate this book UP lmao. i love a trashy toxic romance
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I didn't really know much about it when I dove into it, a lot of people have compared it to the After series by Anna Todd...in which I have to strongly disagree. Travis was a great H, whereas Hardin was a selfish douche who verbally abused his h. Anywho, enough about that series, I have reviews on those if you're curious enough.
This is the story of Travis ‘Maddog' Maddox, who is a tattoo covered ladies man that spends his time beating the hell out of people in an underground college fight ring. Then there's Abby Abernathy, a “good girl” that's starting her first semester of college far away from her hometown. Abby has secrets that she's trying to get away from.
I loved Travis so much, he was damn near perfect. I had a few faults with him but all-in-all he was amazing. Abby on the other hand was a horrible bitch. She's definitely not my least favorite h ever, but she's probably in the top 10. She treated Travis like shit and then wanted to get mad when he tried to move on after they broke up.
I personally couldn't see what was so special about her.
This book could be a bit cheesy at times, but it was also very sweet. I can't wait to get my hands on the next one.
I don't really know how to rate this book. On the one hand, the writing is average at best, and because it's self-published (I assume?) it's got quite a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. It basically reads like the kind of fanfic I've read hundreds of times on fanfic.net or wattpad.
And yet it was exactly what I wanted. I was LOOKING for student-teacher smut, and it totally delivered. Sure, some of the things that happened were totally ridiculous (they didn't ever seem to be worried about getting caught, despite having sex at school constantly, like every day), but this sort of book isn't there to be realistic. Although I could have done without Luci constantly rolling her eyes. Do people even roll their eyes at each other, REALLY? If they do, they definitely don't do it in every single scene.
So if I'm rating this on its page-turning goodness, it'd be 4 stars. I flew through this.
If I'm rating it on how good a book it actually is, then it's 2 stars.
So I've compromised on 3, but it's a weak 3. I certainly wouldn't read it again, because there's nothing to it except seeing what happens next.
So much absurdly unnecessary drama, and Travis out there looking real obsessive and abusive and psychologically unfit for any relationship, makes it a hell no for me.
This is my first trial read New Adult genre. This book didn't work for me. This book tells from Abby's perspective. I want to give the 2nd book a shot, it tells from Travis prespective.
I bought this book on sale thinking it was going to be a simple love story, I was wrong. I got sucked into it and was hard to put down. Great story can't wait to read the next one.
I'm a believer that when shit happens in your relationship and when you tried and it still wouldn't work, past troubles come back and promised changes doesn't happen. It's more than enough to stop it, and this book is not any of that. To make it worse our heroine has a best friend who is all too girly and sentimental for me who doesn't understand a reason she makes things unreasonable and it gets our perfectly calm and cool heroine confused. I mean friends are there for support not to makes decisions for you, I would have liked her a bit given she doesn't fucking shove her damn unreasonable shit. Ugh. I hate it.
The idea of Travia Maddox is lovable tbh. It's just that there are some dialogues that I can't imagine being said in real life. Like how he always finishes his fucking sentences with his petname for Abby? I can't. Maybe some people like that, but it's not my cup of tea. I would laugh everytime I would have been called like that every damn time.
And I think it's a little prolonged. This could have been better without the other chapters.
todavía no lo termino, pero como se publica un capítulo cada mil años, ya me desesperé (pero lo voy a seguir leyendo e.e )
I decided to give this four stars because the characters were more realistic and flawed and that made them more approachable and relatable. It definitely has some thrilling twists in the latter half and made for a very entertaining read.
“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.
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.
Es un libro rápido y fácil de leer.
Es bastante montaña rusa, a veces quieres matarla a ella otras a él... Eso sí, adorarás a America sobre todas las cosas (la mejor amiga de Abby)
La primera parte del libro esta bien, es distinto...Luego todo cambia, a mi parecer a mejor...Pero la tercera parte entra un poco en modo repetición.
En resumen es una buena lectura, con personajes fuertes y personalidades volubles, y una historia bonita.
(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.❞