Beautiful Disaster (The Bet, #1) - Francette Phal 3.5 stars

This was an interesting read. Not even sure how to rate it to be perfectly honest.

I still can't decide if I liked it or not.

I'll say this, the author has a beautiful and interesting writing style. There were a lot of grammatical errors, but the writing is JUST good enough to take away from that, so I didn't get irritated with it too much. Plus, to me, it just comes with the territory of indie books, so I deal with it.

Now, as for the story, it reminded me a lot of Cruel Intentions...like A LOT.

The story is focused on a clique of rich, bored, drug using, over-sexed highschoolers that get off on causing others pain?

At the center of this group is Nicholas. imageHe's rich, he's hot, he's f*cked practically every girl on campus, and to top it off he's a masochist with a broken moral compass. Hmmm...
image

Then he meets Ellie...(after being bet that he can't get her to sleep with him) and things start to change

image

The story is interesting, but extremely unrealistic. Now I fully comprehend that I'm reading fiction. I also read as a form of escapism. However, there are so many things in this book that just didn't make a lick of sense to me.



Nicholas fucks everything that has a pair of boobs, he's filthy rich, but e's stupid enough to do it w/o protection and ends up knocking up a conquest. Sure, makes perfect sense...

Ellie has a baby with a violent crazy ex, but I never read one mention of condoms in all her sexcapades with Nicholas, and she ends up pregnant AGAIN. allrighty then...



There was just SO much going on here aside from the story of the main 2 characters, and practically all of them had a POV. I'm not sure that was necessary, and it was almost distracting at times.

There were stalkers, crazy exes, and a love story mixed in between.

There is a crazy cliff hanger in the end. Thankfully I waited to read this book until the second one was already out. Otherwise that ending would have drove me nuts.

So if you're looking for a super angsty dark read, you might enjoy this book. I was somewhere in the middle. so it gets a 3.5 star rating from me.