Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire

Title: Beautiful Disaster
Author: Jamie McGuire
Publisher: Atria Books
Release date: August 14th 2012

Rating: 4/5

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The new Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate percentage of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance between her and 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.

Abby is trying to escape her past, so she decides to reinvent herself and join with her best friend a university where no one knows her, so she chose to go to Eastern University. There she hopes to lead a normal life and stay out of trouble and everything goes as she wanted until she meets Travis Maddox, a boy with a bad reputation as a womanizer and he´s also an underground fighter.

Travis gets all the girl he wishes, that is until he meets Abby and she rejects it, one thing leads to another and they end up being good friends. Abby and Travis are both more similar than they think, so she will do everything possible to keep her feelings to herself and just be friends, since she does not want to return to the world that she is trying to escape.

Abby at the beginning of the book is sweet and innocent (or at least that's what it seems), but as time goes by her real personality comes out and she is very insecure, stubborn and refuses to acknowledge her true feelings for Travis.

Travis is a bad boy, with bad temper and he believes that everything can be solved by punching people, he drinks a lot to the point that sometimes he doesn´t remember what he did when he was drunk, he sleeps with different girls all the time (never repeating a girl) and treats them as objects (the only exceptions are Abby and America who is Abby´s best friend and girlfriend of Travis's cousin), but underneath all that toughness is a very insecure guy, sweet (at least with Abby) and Abby is the only person who can tame him. Travis is a character that I loved one moment and the next moment I dislike him and the next I would love him again.

Beautiful Disaster belongs to the "new" category of fiction for young adults known as New-Adult that is address to people that are legally an adult and usually takes place in college. That said the book is a bit more explicit than the YA books in regard to the sex scenes, without being an erotic book.

This book was difficult for me to rate, because the story is good and could not put it down but I was debating because the violence of the book, since Travis is a very violent, and his solution is to hit people (only men), which to me is not the solution. But in Beautiful Disaster the relationship between Travis and Abby work, mainly because they are wrong for each other, yet at the same time they are right for each other and only Abby can save Travis from himself.

Beautiful Disaster is seen from the point of view of Abby and the next book in the series is Walking Disaster is the same story of Beautiful Disaster but from Travis point of view.

Beautiful Disaster is a book that you can love or hate, I had read several reviews of this book before deciding to read it and I must say I was a little scared, but my curiosity won and I do not regret it. I liked Beautiful Disaster, I recommend it.