Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate number of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance from 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 wants—and needs—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.
I actually feel physically ill after (barely) finishing Beautiful Disaster. Despite what the name suggests, there's nothing beautiful about this book. The cover is actually a surprisingly accurate representation of the book, now that I'm looking at it more carefully. At it's core, Beautiful Disaster is the story of a naive girl who meets the hot, bad-boy of her dreams and is sucked into a whirlwind, abusive relationship that masquerades as a swoon-worthy teen romance. Abby is literally the butterfly trapped in the glass jar as illustrated by the cover.
I had so many issues with this book that I don't even know where to begin. I'll start with the characters, which is where most of the problems come from.
Travis. Reading about this dude left me speechless, and not the good kind. I'm sure you've heard the saying, "Everyone loves a bad boy." Well that's all fine and well if the bad boy is "bad" in the sense that he's maybe a little broody, wears leather jackets, and is full of sass. But a guy who prevents you from just speaking with other guys, before you're even romantically involved? A guy who tries to attack his own friends because they helped you leave his apartment (his words, verbatim) the morning after the two of you slept together? A guy who comes unhinged and destroys said apartment because you didn't say goodbye in the morning? A guy who beats the shit out of random guys at the drop of hat, just because they playfully touched your arm, or God forbid, innocently tried to flirt with you in a social setting? No, I'm sorry, that's not a bad boy, that's a scarily abusive asshole. And we, as readers, are supposed to swoon over him and "drop our panties" (a phrase used about a thousand times throughout the course of the novel to describe Travis' disgusting encounters with women). It's unhealthy, it's absolutely sick. And yet the author portrays him as this incredibly hot, mysterious, sexy guy...the perfect guy. And that's the message that's being sent to the thousands of young girls that read this book. That THAT'S the kind of guy you want, and that's how you deserve to be treated. Literally trapped in a relationship like a child with no free will, no ability to fend for yourself, or even think for yourself. And the most sickening part of it all is that this book has 86,000 five star reviews on Goodreads of people raving over Travis. I can't.
And Abby. She's no better than Travis. OVER AND OVER he exhibits horrifying displays of obsession, possessiveness, and creepy stalker behavior (not to mention thousands of abusive red flags), and yet after every single incident, she forgives him unfailingly. All it takes is some mind-blowing sex, a cute puppy as a present, and his robotic pleas of "I'm so sorry, it'll never happen again" and they're back to normal. There's so many times when I was screaming at her to walk away and never look back, to for ONCE be strong and stick up for herself, but every time she even got close to saying, "Whoa, dude, back the hell off!", she'd get lost in his dreamy eyes and it'd be all over. Not to mention the part where she is steadily dating the ONLY sane, rational character in the entire series but is living in Travis' apartment and actually sleeping in his bed with him through her relationship with the decent guy?? Speaking of Parker, he literally warns her in a reasonable, well-meaning way several times that Travis is no good...that he's going to hurt her...and she rolls her eyes because he's obviously just jealous of their love. Oh, and her roommate, Kara! She makes multiple comments saying that their relationship is codependent, bordering on creepy. And that it's dangerous to need someone so much, the way Travis does. And yet she's dismissed as the geeky, uptight roommate that couldn't possibly understand their true love.
The minor characters aren't any better. Abby's best friend America is literally a cardboard cutout who serves no other purpose than to continually get mad at Abby because Travis is sooo hot and he's sooo in love with her, and she's breaking his poor heart by having a shred of self-respect by not being with him. She repeatedly tells Abby that who cares about his "past" behaviors and habits, because just LOOK at how much he's changed in the past few weeks. Forget having Abby's best interests at heart, let's just push her into an abusive relationship because...God knows why??? And Shepley, Travis' cousin/roommate/best friend/only friend serves as the character that reminds Abby that "that's just Travis being Travis" and it's something that she's "just going to have to get used to" whenever Travis loses his mind over the smallest thing and leaves random guys bloody and curled in the fetal position ....because she doesn't have any other choice, right? It's not like she can walk away and find a perfectly decent guy like, say, Parker.
And lastly, though not quite as serious, throughout the course of the novel, I couldn't help but wonder if the author had ever actually attended a four-year university, or even visited one? The whole thing read like a cliche high school drama, all from the actual cafeteria and their reserved lunch-table that they sit at every single day, to the rumor mill that somehow manages to circulate through the ENTIRE university. I'm just going to put this out there: unless you're in the same friend circle, random people that you've never met don't just have ~reputations~ at a university. Maybe in high school where everyone knows each other and you're all in the same classes, but at an actual university? Absolutely not. And speaking of classes, despite having vastly different majors, it was interesting to me that they happened to be in the same ones and all had class at the same time. Again: cliche high school story.
Long story short, I'm so not impressed. I do apologize...most of my reviews won't be this angry, but the topic of abusive, dominant male leads and weak, female characters is something that I'm really passionate about it. This whole book is just so not okay, on about a hundred thousand different levels.
What I'm trying to say is:
Please girls, don't buy into the messages sent by this book. You're worth more than that, and the insinuation that you need a guy like Travis to take care of you and "protect you" is actual bullshit.
Pages: 319
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date of Publication: May 26, 2011
Rating:
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