Title: Beautiful Disaster

Author: Jamie McGuire

Series: Beautiful Disaster, #1

Genres: Contemporary Romance, New Adult

Publisher: Atria (Imprint of Simon & Schuster)

Date Published: August 14th, 2012

Edition: Paperback

Rating: 5 stars

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.

Sarah’s Review: Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

Phew. I feel like I just let out a breath I’ve been holding for the past four hours reading this book cover to cover — flipping through it like a madwoman on crack or something.

Beautiful Disaster is seriously the perfect way to describe the relationship between Abby and Travis. They are crazy for each other — and when I say crazy, I mean probably a little insane. The kind of crazy in love that leads them to do things like scream at each other in the middle of a packed campus lunchroom, while at the same time remaining each others’ anchor when the waves life throws at them seem to get impossibly high. Don’t get me wrong, by the end of the book it’s pretty darn clear that they are without a doubt in love with each other. But as Kara, Abby’s roommate, would describe them, they definitely have a (potentially unhealthy) co-dependency on each other.

I’m not sure what it says about me that despite that — probably even a little because of that — I absolutely adored this book. A lot of it has to do with Travis I think. While I did like Abby for the most part, it was pretty much impossibly not to fall hard for Travis. He’s pretty much every girls’ secret fantasy — bad boy inadvertently tamed and madly in love with just one special girl.

I know that a lot of people have said that Travis’ “obsession” with Abby is unhealthy and I suppose that it’s a debatable argument. He does some pretty questionable things that, in real life, might be very big red flags warning a potentially very dysfunctional relationship. But at the same time, this is fictional, and sometimes what might scream restraining-order in real life generally equals passion in the fictional world. Hey, you know it’s true!

Even so, I don’t want people reading this review to think I found Travis to be some crazy psycho, because I didn’t and he’s not. I actually fell pretty hard for him. He’s very passionate and if you’re lucky enough to be on the receiving end of his love train he really doesn’t hold back his feelings. This is really what I loved most about him. He’s so. Freakin. In. Love with Abby. It’s hard not to be a little jealous of her, especially when she continues to push him away, albeit sometimes for good reasons, but other times I just want to smack her upside the head for missing what (or more precisely who) is right in front of her.

Anyways…This book is definitely an emotional roller coaster. So if you decide to dive in just be prepared for not wanting to put it down until they have their happily-ever-after. But also be ready to fall in love with Abby and Travis’ passionate battle to leave their pasts behind and move forward hand-in-hand together.