Review! Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

INTENSE. DANGEROUS. ADDICTIVE.

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.

Review: so everyone told me I HAD to read this book and having received it at a bloggers event at Simon and Schuster back in autumn I thought it was about time I should read it. The impending online book club gave me the final push to begin to work my way through it. I really liked the owning of this book because it gets you straight into the action. Although I wasn't sure what was going on initially, what kind of fight the characters were at, it sure as he,l made me want to read to on to find out.

I often find with YA or NA novels that I dislike the main characters because they seem to be a slightly many teenager type, and unfortunately this was the case with this novel. Abby seems to be fairly successful in her studies, has got into college, has a best friend, and yet she seems to bitch and moan an awful lot. American, her best friend, is no different, she just seems to go running around stirring up drama the whole time. Now if this book were set in a high school, I would be,I've this to be the case, we all did a little bit of stirring in that kind of situation, but I just felt that once, we've left that environment and reached the ripe old age of 19, we could manage to be a bit more mature about things.

The male characters in the book were slightly better, slightly more sure of themselves. Main character Travis is definitely and heartthrob, and I liked him because he seemed determined to go for the things that he wanted in life. He went for Abby, her used his fights to fund his lifestyle and he studied to make sure that he got good grades at school. A bad boy with a brain. He also had a good sense of morals, in that he wanted to make sure Abby was OK even when he was pounding some guy's face into the ground. I didn't like his short temper, but the character was much better written than Abby because I could recognise a lot of his character traits in guys I have known.

I was left slightly wondering the point of the storyline. Travis and Abby got together fairly quickly and then after that it seemed to be a continuous cycle of her overreacting and being pissed at them. Then they go to Vegas (a part of the story I did not get at all) and then they go back to cycle of her cutting him out because he looked at someone the wrong way or something. I think it was very well written, otherwise I wouldn't have managed to get to the end, and I found myself holding my breath during a particularly dramatic bit near the finish of the novel, which is always a good sign!

If you are a fan of YA then I am sure you will enjoy the incredibly self indulgent nature of Abby and swoon (as I did) over Travis. This was a little hard to get through but I did enjoy some parts of it, and I am sure that it has been so well received because it has a loyal fan base. I myself won't be rushing to read the sequel, although Walking Disaster did seem to be even more warmly received than this first novel!