Beautiful Disaster Review
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Reviewed by Taylor Beach, Editor-in-Chief
In Jamie McGuire’s new adult romance novel Beautiful Disaster every turn of the page gets more complicated and intricately beautiful. There’s no such thing as a sense of peace for the characters in her novels which makes for a nail-biting, heart-pounding, and intense emotional rollercoaster read.
I was so addicted at the time of reading Beautiful Disaster when it came out in 2012 that I read well into the late hours of the night and finished the book the next day. The dark circles under my eyes cursed Jamie McGuire and also praised her for her clever tactics of keeping her reader’s attention till the very last page with her use of action-packed scenes, lovable characters, and one original, never-been-done-before plot.
Jamie McGuire paved the way for the other authors of the new adult romance genre with Beautiful Disaster, the first book in her Beautiful series. I began noticing how many authors in the genre used similar instances from Beautiful Disaster such as the bad boy who is a “Walking One-Night Stand.”
Jamie McGuire’s novel is about a girl named Abby Abernathy who has had a troubled and complicated past and all she wants is to escape it and start over. Her new beginning entails becoming the good girl and to avoid everything and everyone who threatens that. Enter Travis Maddox, the tattooed underground fighter who threatens to bring more mayhem to her newly no-drama way of life. She resists his charms. He is intrigued. And so goes the cat and mouse game only the catch is that Travis has met his match.
It begins with a bet. If Travis loses a fight, he must remain abstinent for a month. If Abby loses, she must live in Travis’s apartment for the same amount of time. This novel is a back and forth game between Abby and Travis’s stubbornness at the fact that they are the exact same. They’ve met their match and all they do is fight it. They fight their attraction for one another which is honestly the most infuriating concept on the face of this planet. I can’t tell you how many times I shouted at the both of them: “Just shut up and just kiss already!” The tension in the novel is marvelous and I know, without a doubt, Jamie McGuire is the master of tension.
I believe Jamie McGuire enjoyed toying with her reader’s emotions the way she enjoyed toying with Abby and Travis’s complicated relationship. She truly mastered the idea of choosing between the passionate mind-blowing love affair vs. the safe relationship with the paradox of Travis Maddox and Parker, the goody-two shoes rich boy. As a reader, we see eye-to-eye with Abby and her constant dilemma of following her heart or her head. Back-and-forth between being with Travis and not being with Travis was emotionally draining. I had tears every time Abby refused to see how perfect they were together. Every step of the way, you will find yourself rooting for Abby and Travis and their love. Jamie McGuire gave me hope that there is someone out there waiting to love me and protect me as much as Travis loves Abby.
This was one of the most complicated love stories I ever read.
When her past comes back, Abby questions everything. Travis is her only constant. Love is all about succumbing to the fear of falling and the fear of being hurt beyond imagination. But when it’s real love, you never give up. You never stop fighting.
Beautiful Disaster is a novel written for sheer entertainment. It isn’t some novel like A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens that can be analyzed for a deeper meaning within every word. What you read is at face value. It is raw. I like to think of Beautiful Disaster as watching a really good TV show and every book is its own episode into a larger whole.
It’s all connected—a beautiful disaster.
Meet the Author and Further Reading
Jamie McGuire is the New York Times bestselling author of three YA paranormal romance books: Providence, Requiem, and Eden. The second installment of the Beautiful series is Walking Disaster, the same story but from Travis’s perspective. The third is a novella called Something Beautiful and this story deals with Shepley Maddox and America. Then Jamie McGuire creates The Maddox Brothers series consisting of all the Maddox brother’s love lives. Those book s are called Beautiful Oblivion, Beautiful Redemption, Beautiful Sacrifice, and her new release of A Beautiful Funeral comes out this August! She’s written an apocalyptic thriller called Red Hill and also a dark sci-fi romance novel called Apollonia.
Jamie McGuire lives in Steamboat Springs, Colorado with her husband Jeff, and their three children.