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kaivega 's review for:
The Beautiful Maddening
by Shea Ernshaw
This book was one of the biggest wastes of my time ever. Like, genuinely, it pissed me off so much that I lowered my rating of The Wicked Deep from two stars to one out of spite. The narration felt very "I'm 14 and this is deep", and like 100 pages in I thought that if I read about Oak's green eyes again I was going to end up in the news (spoiler: it never stops talking about his green eyes. Btw did you know his eyes are green? Because they're green. Emerald, some might say. Others might say green. Not me. I would just say that he has green eyes).
The plot made absolutely no sense either. Full of plot holes, painstakingly slow and pointless. Everything felt repetitive and immature, and it genuinely has one of the worst structures and character arcs I've ever read. I thought that the point would be discovering who stole the tulips, but don't worry, this book doesn't want to waste your time and talk about things that are not the romance, so the culprit just confesses out of nowhere in a very weird scene and every problem is immediately solved.
Also, it was never fully explained how the tulips work. Hey, can you be consistent for five fucking seconds? For what I understand, if you have a tulip, people fall in love with you as long as it serves the plot, otherwise they don't work, or they make you fall in love with someone else, unless the author doesn't want you to, and they only work in the main character's village, which is why she wants to move away, except that it's implied that they might work in other places as well <3 don't worry about it. If you think about it for two seconds, you might have given it more thought than the author did.
The characters are atrocious. The only thing that Lark ever did was complain and whine, she was incredibly passive and I kept waiting for her to do literally anything. I'm going to copy and paste what I told my boyfriend while I was reading. Spoiled in case you want to read this book because you don't value your free time:
Something else that made me feel I was losing braincells.
Also, are we not going to talk about the fact that Lark's mom and Oak's dad were dating, Oak knew from the beginning and they kept making out anyway? Am I the only one who thinks that's weird? Alright. Straight people are wild.
The ending of the book felt like a big slap to the face. Lark hadn't had a lot of character growth or evolution (if she'd had any), and then the last scene reverses everything she had stood for. Alright. What was the point?
BTW, in case you forgot, Oak has green eyes.
Don't waste your time with this.
The plot made absolutely no sense either. Full of plot holes, painstakingly slow and pointless. Everything felt repetitive and immature, and it genuinely has one of the worst structures and character arcs I've ever read. I thought that the point would be discovering who stole the tulips, but don't worry, this book doesn't want to waste your time and talk about things that are not the romance, so the culprit just confesses out of nowhere in a very weird scene and every problem is immediately solved.
Also, it was never fully explained how the tulips work. Hey, can you be consistent for five fucking seconds? For what I understand, if you have a tulip, people fall in love with you as long as it serves the plot, otherwise they don't work, or they make you fall in love with someone else, unless the author doesn't want you to, and they only work in the main character's village, which is why she wants to move away, except that it's implied that they might work in other places as well <3 don't worry about it. If you think about it for two seconds, you might have given it more thought than the author did.
The characters are atrocious. The only thing that Lark ever did was complain and whine, she was incredibly passive and I kept waiting for her to do literally anything. I'm going to copy and paste what I told my boyfriend while I was reading. Spoiled in case you want to read this book because you don't value your free time:
Spoiler
alright this fucking sucks
i was sure that the climax would be the main character deciding that she's fed up with this house and this garden and burning everything to the ground, and i was waiting for that cathartic moment
and after having a fight with her brother she was like "boobooboo poor me i hate this house and this garden i wish the rain would get rid of everything i hate it hereeee" and i was like alright. now she is going to make the active choice of destroying this place, right? right?
nope. it starts raining very hard and the rain destroys the house and the garden and the love interest, who for some reason was there, saves her, because she's a useless fucking idiot. i want to kill myself
are you telling me that in five or six generations or whatever this small village in the mountains of oregon hasn't had a single big storm. fuck off
Something else that made me feel I was losing braincells.
Spoiler
How did she see that Oak's book had a tulip petal? Does she have fucking X-ray vision? I hate this book.Also, are we not going to talk about the fact that Lark's mom and Oak's dad were dating, Oak knew from the beginning and they kept making out anyway? Am I the only one who thinks that's weird? Alright. Straight people are wild.
The ending of the book felt like a big slap to the face. Lark hadn't had a lot of character growth or evolution (if she'd had any), and then the last scene reverses everything she had stood for. Alright. What was the point?
Spoiler
If she has spent her entire life worried that no one is going to love her because of the tulips, why the hell did she keep the tulip petal? Let's play in a scenario in which it makes sense that she had it. Why didn't she get rid of it. I genuinely felt that the author was laughing in my face, pointing at me and saying "look at the loser who wasted so many hours with this!"BTW, in case you forgot, Oak has green eyes.
Don't waste your time with this.