Beautiful Bastard by Christina Lauren
Beautiful Bastard by Christina LaurenMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Okay. I have read this before, but I never finished it fully. I gave it a second chance to see if my opinion would change. It didn't. Like before, I had to struggle to get past page 110. And then I couldn't really figure out a plot...
I think the real issue with this book is there is so much sex. To the point where you're reading the same thing over and over. Nothing changes except the location. And the feelings aren't believable. I was waiting for the big explosion where all of these feelings just came pouring out, but it never came.
One of the most disturbing things about this book was the fact that you could really see the influence it had on EL James "Fifty Shades of Grey." There was one scene that she practically robbed from Christina & Lauren. Bennett (Edward) had said he wanted "Chloe to be sore so she would be reminded of him..." or something along that lines, and it just aggravated me. I don't like either book, honestly, but it's a shame people have to steal other people's work and ideas, and then make it bigger in the world. Once I read that scene, I was watching for words that EL James used, characteristics, phrases....The whole "Miss. Mills" reminded me of "Miss. Steele" in the way that it was used so frequently.
And as much as I don't like the author, I will go out on a whim here and say that I do believe Fifty Shades is better. It seems like EL James took what Christina Lauren had and molded it into something better. (I know, that's terrible to say.) I think Beautiful Bastard should've been only from Chloe's POV. That's where this book failed. I was tired of revisiting scenes in his perspective and found myself flipping through pages just to get to the present. I didn't want to make this review about Fifty Shades, but it's sad that that's how it's turned out. Both BB and FSOG are crap, but BB is worse, I feel. This is the book that started the whole FSOG hype. Though it was written with poorer quality, I think it probably should've been the record breaker with sales. But everyone knows that didn't happen. James got her break first and because of that everyone thinks Christina Lauren was a copy-cat. They're both terrible books, but I just feel sorry for these (Christian & Lauren) authors because I think they didn't get their due. (Make sense?)
And I apologize that this review sounds like I am preaching ect...But after finally finishing BB for the first time I just sat back and thought about Fifty Shades. It's aggravating because while FSOG didn't have an amazing storyline, it was written better than BB. I can see where all of the inspiration came for FSOG, I do. There was a lot of similar word usage and the way sentences were phrased. It was like reading a piss poor version of FSOG. It sucks to know this one never got the recognition it should've, but I can kind of see why it didn't.
It had the potential to be great, but for me that greatness was robbed by 1) two POV's, 2) a hungry author (EL James) trying to make it in the world, and 3) the back history of it being Twilight fan fiction. I understand if it hadn't been posted online it would never have been published. (Let's get real here, Christina/Lauren aren't exactly JK Rowling as far as writing goes.) It was P2P and no matter what they say, the editor barely touched the damn thing. In total, I've read this 3 times. 2 times, of which, I couldn't finish past page 110. The first time I didn't finish, I had read the fan fiction version with Edward. The second time was with Bennett. And aside from a little comma here and there, they are virtually the same. This book needed some serious editing to compete with Fifty and never got it. Given, it did make the NYT Bestsellers, but it could've been so much more with the proper writing and editing.
Okay, I'm done rambling. Just had to get that out there. My 2 stars remains unaltered.
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