Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful, #1)

by Jamie McGuire

[EBookObsessed]

Abby Abernathy has come to Eastern University get away from her parents. Her mother is a drunk and her father is a gambler and a drunk. She found a school far away from her home in Kansas and she wants to re-create herself. She doesn’t want to follow in her parents’ footsteps. She wants an education and to meet a nice boy from a stable home and become someone else.

So the last thing Abby needs in her life is a big guy with a violent temper like Travis Maddox. He fights for a living. He’s a real womanizer. He doesn’t even take them to his bedroom. He just does them quickly on the couch and sends them on their way. Abby’s relationship with Travis is different. Their–friends. She likes him. She knows deep down he is a nice guy, but she also knows a future with Travis will just lead her to heartbreak and pain. But Travis makes her smile. So why does she want to spend her time with him, rather than the nice boy who wants to be her boyfriend.

When Travis decides he wants to take his fighting professional and Abby can’t convince him of the mistake he is making, she knows that any hope she might have had for a relationship with Travis is impossible. She won’t let Travis drag her down like her father did, or let him blame her if things don’t go his way.

Why is the one man who might be so right for her, so absolutely wrong?

THOUGHTS:
This book also came highly recommended to me so I grabbed an audiobook copy of both this and book 2, Walking Disaster. I cannot tell you how much I dislike these two people.

First of all, although the description tells you that Abby is a good girl who doesn’t drink, she gets drunk A LOT in this book. She does 15 shots of Tequila for her 19th birthday. (I am so stopping my daughter’s college funds.) Travis is also a heavy drinker. When Abby goes on date with Parker, Travis drinks a 5th of whiskey. When he overhears Abby tell her friend, she could never date him, he goes out, gets fall down drunk and comes back to the house and has sex with two women and can’t even remember it all right away. Travis and Abby chug beer at frat parties and do shots at every opportunity. For two people with alcoholic parents and they both hated their upbringing, you would think they would avoid alcohol and getting stick-my-face-in-a-toilet drunk, but no, Travis holds Abby’s hair back while she pukes up her 15 shots and he wakes up many times with no memory of the night before.

I thought Abby was just a bit confused, but as I started Walking Disaster and Travis says she’s “a bit of a bitch,” I realized she really is a bit of bitch. Travis is confused of her feelings for Abby. His mother died when he was three and his father crawled into a bottle until only a few years ago, he doesn’t understand love or why Abby is different to him and why he wants to be with her and will do anything just to be with her. Abby thinks being with Travis will leave her trapped in the same world she grew up and that she was running away from.

Abby and Travis’s relationship whether they are together or just friends is very volatile. There is always drama and yelling and Travis has a tendency to go into a violent rage. On more than one occasion, Abby walks out on Travis behind his back. The first time Travis finds Abby packed her things and left him, he goes into a rage and destroys everything in his house. You might think, “Oh, he loves her.” or like me, you think, if they were real people that I knew I would be avoiding them at all costs. “Oh, Travis and Abby are coming…I forgot, we’re busy.”

Abby walks out on Travis and justifies her actions to the audience, but she never discusses her whys with Travis. He is literally on his knees crying and begging her to take him back. She is crying because she loves him and wants to be with him. But instead of explaining to him what she just explained to us, and giving him one last chance not to mess it up, she walks away, and we have many, many chapters of watching them be miserable.

As one of the characters describes them to Travis, When you are together, it’s unicorns and rainbows, but when you’re not, you want to take the whole world down with you.

Although I felt some sympathy for Travis while he tried to work through these foreign feelings toward Abby, his rages and violence and her bitchy attitude turned me off. I absolutely sped through the audiobook, even listening to it while I could have been reading a book instead, but it was less enjoying these characters and more like watching an accident happen type of fascination.

I am currently listening to Walking Disaster, which is the same story told from Travis’s point of view. I am listening to it only because I purchased both at the same time so I might as well since I paid for it.

Some may say they are passionate. I just feel they are freaking annoying.