Beautiful Disaster is one of those books that I feel like everyone has read at this point, and I am so late to the party. I have heard so many good things about this book that I knew I had to read it. So when I got the chance to listen to the audiobook, I was really excited to finally find out what everyone had been talking about. I have to say this one left me with mixed feelings, and I am still trying to figure out exactly what I am thinking about it. While I liked parts a lot, there were also other things that really did not work for me.
Abby Abernathy needed to escape her life, so she and her best friend headed to Eastern University to put some distance between herself and her past. When she finds herself face to face with the school's playboy, she immediately puts him in his place. Though she is attracted to Travis Maddox, she knows she needs to avoid him. But Travis is determined to win Abby over, and the two begin to form a friendship. As they get closer, both of the feelings start to change though neither of them are willing to admit it to the other. When Travis and Abby make a bet about the outcome of one of his fights, Abby ends up losing and must spend a month with Travis. Will their new circumstances show them that they belong together, or will it all end in disaster?
Both of these characters frustrated me at times, Abby more so than Travis. Travis had been used to going through women, and made no apologies for who he was. But he started to change when he met Abby. I liked how he was with her, and I thought that she brought out the best in him. There were a few times that I really thought that Travis screwed up, but he also did some really sweet and thoughtful things as well. Abby ran hot and cold, and I felt like she gave Travis a lot of mixed signals. I didn't like her dating Parker, and I also didn't like that though she wasn't with Travis she would get mad about him being with others. It was okay for her to date others, but he wasn't supposed to? If she wanted him, she should have been honest rather than just get mad about things that she didn't have a right to be mad about. I did think that they had a great friendship and connection though, and their chemistry and attraction was never a problem. These two were great together, I just felt like the way they got there wasn't the best.
I have to say that I think it was Abby and the way she acted that drove me crazy the most. She made some bad choices and I felt like she overreacted on more than one occasion. While I liked her with Travis, I wanted them to talk more and learn to communicate better. These two were both young, and I think that was a lot of the problem. But I wish that a few things that happened went differently. While I didn't love everything about this story, I did like the book and there were a lot of really entertaining parts. I just think that this story suffered a bit from the immaturity of the characters, and the angst and back and forth got to be a bit much. I liked Emma Galvin's narration though, and I thought that she did a great job of bringing Jamie McGuire's story to life. Emma was clear and easy to understand, and I thought her voice fit perfectly with Abby's character. It was age appropriate and wasn't annoying to me. I felt like she did a really great job of differentiating between characters so that you always knew who it was in the story, and the voices sounded normal. Sometimes when a single narrator tries to do different voices it can come off as strange and that wasn't the case here at all. I will definitely listen to more by Emma Galvin in the future.
**Audiobook Provided by Publisher**
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