Time to review Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire from a writer’s perspective

This post might contain spoilers.

Beautiful Disaster* by Jamie McGuire


(*Amazon Affiliate link)

Summary:  Travis Maddox has the reputation for fighting and one night stands. When he meets good girl Abby Abernathy she keeps him at arm’s length, which makes Travis want her even more. To get closer to her, he proposes a bet. If she wins he must refrain from having sex for a month or if she loses, Abby must move in with Travis for a month. What possibly could go wrong?

Genre

Beautiful Disaster is the relatively recent genre called New Adult (NA) fiction. According to GoodReads, St. Martin’s Press came up with the idea in 2009. NA books feature  protagonists who are 18–25 years old, and concerned with going to college or figuring out career choices as well as navigating adult sexual experiences. As with many New Adult novels, this one is also a romance.

Characters

The protagonist of the book is 18-year-old college student Abby Abernathy. Abby is a virgin who has come to college far from home to escape her father and his reputation. When she meets Travis Maddox with his rippling muscles and tattoos, she must resist his attention to avoid ending up in a similar situation as the one she left . Travis has both anger management issues and commitment issues. Passive/aggressive Abby insists they have a platonic relationship, setting up the “will they or won’t they” trope (see romance tropes).

 

Travis Maddox is the classic anti-hero bad boy, but also has a charming and vulnerable side. Looking through other reviews, readers either love Travis Maddox or they disapprove of his over-the-top, abusive behavior. It is to Jamie McGuire’s credit that many of the most passionate reviews attack Travis. They have suspended their disbelief about a made-up guy — one who was created to develop tension in the plot– to the point they talk about him as if he were a real person. That shows McGuire’s ability to writing complex, authentic characters.

I, on the other hand, could not suspend my disbelief entirely. These days if Travis had actually attacked multiple people with his fists as he does in the book, he would be in jail for assault. It also wasn’t entirely believable that Abby and Travis would sleep together night after night and still be “just friends.” Obviously, this novel is fiction.

Discussion

On the plus side, the book is a quick, easy read. I finished it in one sitting. It was pleasant if you were looking for escapism.

On the negative side, there were a few flaws. As I mentioned in the Book Beginnings post, McGuire uses many exclamation points in the first few pages to emphasize that things are loud! Very loud! She uses exclamation points more often than is recommended and could easily have been omitted with a few well-chosen descriptions. However, the good news is that as I became immersed in the reading the exclamation points faded into the background and were easy to ignore.

As a quick note, Karen and I immediately thought of one of the previous books in the challenge, Fifty Shades of Grey. Both novels are flights of fantasy with bad boys driving them, but the characters in Beautiful  Disaster are regular people, not kinky billionaires. Somehow the fact that Beautiful Disaster was more grounded in the real world made it easier to accept the romantic fantasy aspects for me.

Overall, I would say that Beautiful Disaster is neither beautiful or a disaster. It is simply entertainment to be enjoyed in the moment.

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What are we reading next?

If you ever have questions about what we are reading next or when we’re starting the next discussion, check the 100 Book List tab in the navigation bar at the top of the blog. Links in the list go to the landing page from this blog where the discussion starts. However, this is an open-ended challenge so feel free to jump in with any of the books at any time.

The next book is number 52. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) – Discussion begins December 17, 2018
Literary Fiction