I feel like a hero and you are my heroine Abby touched her palm to my cheek.
Abby: You know what, Mr. Maddox?
Travis: What, baby?
Her expression turned serious.
Abby: In another life, I could love you.
I watched her for a moment, staring into her glassed over eyes. She was drunk, but just for a moment it didn't seem wrong to pretend that she meant it.
Travis: I might love you in this one.
Her words at the party replayed in my mind. If we were in another life, I could love you. Abby was lying weak and sick in my arms, depending on me to take care of her. In that moment I recognized that my feelings for her were a lot stronger than I thought. Sometime between the moment we met, and holding her on that bathroom floor, I had fallen in love with her"
To douchebags!” he said, gesturing to Brad. “And to girls that break your heart,” he bowed his head to me. His eyes lost focus. “And to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her.
“
| — | Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire (via maeeeloves) |
“His tongue searched my mouth, and i could feel the vibration of his deep groans against my chest as he kept his promise to make our last day together memorable.
I could spend a thousand years trying to block that moment from my memory, and it would still be burned into my mind.”
| Chapter 17 | No Thanks | Beautiful Disaster |
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Book Description:
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.
My Review:
My first thoughts on finishing this book:
Wow. This book. I can’t words…djanga;dvjnkajsdngkasjng
But I figured not a lot of people would appreciate that review, so I decided to give it a day or two before I tried to review it. I’m not promising it’ll be any more coherent than that, but I’m gonna try. Just so you know my frame of mind when going into this book, I saw the cover and was intrigued, the synopsis sounded right up my alley, so I did what I always do, looked it up on goodreads. And wow! People feel really strongly about this book! So I read a few of the negative reviews and they scared me off. But every time I saw it I wanted to give it a shot again. And the rating is so high despite all the biting bad reviews. Finally I read like a page of the kindle sample and I was turned off by all the cussing. I generally don’t read books with that much bad language, it irritates me. And then Walking Disaster came out. And basically I was just too intrigued to stay away any longer. I saw them sitting next to each other on the shelf the other day and bought them both right then. It was the blue butterfly that did me in. It’s so pretty! I’ve had a blue butterfly tattoo since I was 16, I just couldn’t resist. ;-)
I was very nervous opening Beautiful Disaster. I was afraid I was going to be totally offended and disgusted and have to find someone to give the books away to in a hurry because I couldn’t stand for them to be in my house one more minute. As you can probably deduce from my rating, that did not happen. After maybe 2 pages I was totally engrossed. Say what you want about the storyline, maybe it’s not your thing, I get that, but Jamie McGuire can write. Her characters explode off the pages in living color. Hours went by without me being even slightly aware of the time passing. I haven’t been this absorbed by a book in a very long time. I love all the characters. Not because they’re all perfect or good or kind or even smart, but because they all seem real. And yeah, they’re all flawed, the whole book is pretty much based on that. No one ever denies it. But I really ended up caring for them, even if I sometimes wanted to smack them. :P
Books are so subjective, they sink or swim basically based on each readers own personal experience which bleeds into and colors the narrative. I thought about knocking a star or two off this rating. My five star ratings are usually for books that are not only well written good stories, but that teach me or move me in such a way that I want everyone and their grandmother to experience them. This one’s different. Although I would love to share this book with everyone I know, and it did move me, I can see why it would only appeal to a certain audience. I do not usually read books with this much bad language, as I said, nor with this much sexual content. The reason this book is still getting a five star rating with all of that is because even though I don’t like it, I can’t argue with it. I fought the book and the book won. Because both of the elements I just mentioned may not be what I like to read about, but they’re absolutely realistic in the context of this story. (And in the context of my own reality when I was 19.) They’re not gratuitous, not added for dramatic effect or shock value and they’re not given any special emphasis or lingered over, they’re a natural part of the story. And having them absent would seem kind of off. Besides those two things, the only other element that got on my nerves was that Travis was obviously absent from kindergarten the day they taught “no hitting.” Even that only bothered me about three quarters of the way through when I wanted to pull him aside give him a hug and be like “It’s gonna be okay, but dude you gotta stop hitting people.” But then things turned around and he did, so it was only a minor issue. I felt for him I really did. He was dealing with SO much stress and he was trying SO hard. I really didn’t think he got enough credit for basically turning his entire life around in a very short amount of time. Whether your lifestyle is good/healthy or not, any major change like that would be difficult. Things would also have been easier on everyone if friends could stay out of each other’s business, people didn’t care what others thought so much, and they wouldn’t try to deal with emotionally charged situations when they’d been drinking/wouldn’t drink so much. But I’ve been there, because that’s college life, because college kids don’t know that/don’t care.
I did not have some of the problems that other reviewers seemed to have with Travis. Although he had a temper, I never felt like he was a real threat to anyone, least of all Abby. He adored Abby. From the reviews I read it sounded like he was going to be a raging abusive maniac who locked her away in his room and her falling in love with him was just due to stockholm syndrome. I thought his temper, though maybe a little over the top, was fitting with the rest of his character. He had closed himself off to feeling anything besides anger and superficial pleasure for basically his entire life. But he’s a passionate dude. And now all of a sudden his entire world is opening up, in reality and emotionally. And he doesn’t know how to handle it. He even says he doesn’t know how to handle it. And I’m sorry but I was cheering for him when he hit Chris Jenks. Dude needed to have some sense knocked into him. So I guess I don’t see what people are upset about. You’ve never gotten mad and broken something? No guys ever got in fights or punched lockers/walls at your schools? It’s not like his actions were ever condoned or that he didn’t change his ways.
I didn’t find Abby boring or wishy-washy at all, either. I totally related to her. Her heart had made the decision about Travis before she was ready to deal with everything. And she was afraid of how strong her feelings were and the future and him turing out just like her father. That makes perfect sense to me. Her actions were frustrating at times, but again, not unrealistic.
Beautiful Disaster resonated with me and took me totally off guard. There were a lot of details and scenes that paralleled things that I have seen or experienced in my own life. (Not the hitting parts-just to be clear! :P) Between that and the way the story was able to make me care so much, move me from laughter to tears, and everything in between, and the vivid characters that I will not soon forget, this book earned my five stars.
Five stars!
Walking Disaster (pseudo-sequel to Beautiful Disaster) by Jamie McGuire.
Holy mother, I could NOT put this book down. I fell in love with Travis all over again, and now that I hear rumors of a possible movie, I am so excited! Amazing amazing amazing book.
Read the synopsis HERE
Genre: Romance
Rating: 5 stars
Spoilers!
I know I haven’t done a review on the first book, Beautiful Disaster, but I read it in August and am too lazy to go and review it. Needless to say, Beautiful Disaster is one of my favorite books. I was very excited…
