Rating: 3.5 stars
Equal parts beautiful and disaster.
Goodreads summary: The new 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 needs—and wants—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.
Okay... so I have some mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I found this book to be thoroughly entertaining. There was romance, there was passion, there was an alarming amount of DRAMA. Abby and Travis were simultaneously frustrating and fascinating (both as a couple and as individual characters), and their roller coaster of a relationship really made my head spin (in a good and bad way). They had a pretty toxic relationship, which I normally can’t stand behind, but in their case, they (and the people around them) were pretty aware of the toxicity. Normally, characters don’t realize their in a bad relationship and just continue to free-dive into a cyclone of disaster, but Abby and Travis were like: “yeah, we’re messed up, but we’re kinda obsessed with each other, so I guess we’ll just deal with it in our own toxic, messed up way”, so I was like: “ok, cool.”
Now, on the other hand, the story started to lose me (towards the end especially) as the plot started to become a bit too over the top and unbelievable - to the point where it sometimes felt like I was reading a soap opera. A soap opera can be fun, but it just wasn’t working for me this time, and felt a bit incongruent and convoluted.
Overall, I thought that Beautiful Disaster was a fun read - despite the cheesiness, and over the top plot line, I was pretty hooked for most of the book.
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