Beautiful Ugly – A Book That Was Surprisingly Disappointing

Blurb of Beautiful Ugly

Author Grady Green was having the worst best day of his life. He called his wife Abby while she was driving home with the good news of his becoming a New York Bestseller Author. In mid-conversation, he heard her slam on brakes to help a collapsed woman in red coat… And then nothing. He found her car by the edge of the cliff with his wife vanished.

A year later, he was still in the throes of his grief and wanted to know what happened to Abby. His agent sent him to a Scottish island to write his book. But all he saw was his wife at different spots on the island.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

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My Review

The book was written from the POV of the main male character Grady Green, and the overall vibe I received from the book was pages and pages of narration filled with I, ME, MYSELF. There were a few chapters interspersed which had Abby’s POV too, just to keep the suspense flowing. I had great hopes that this book would make my thriller-y heart fibrillate with an adrenaline rush. But alas, all it did was to make me want to finish it fast. The plot line and subplots were simply was not enough to make the book unputdownable. Shocking but true.

1 star

Why I Picked Up Beautiful Ugly

The cover enticed me with the way the fonts were in reverse, and the blue color too caught my eye. I loved the idea of a character going to an inhabited island where there were hardly any people living and finding himself in the vortex of suspense. The blurb as written above too gave the hints of this being a domestic thriller, but it was kinda obvious it was not a murder mystery from the get-go.

Themes, Plot, Writing

The theme was of a closed island mystery where the main character had no way of getting off it. I was eager to see how Grady would then find his way back to London and maybe solve a couple of subplots in the interim. Let me warn you right away – don’t hold your breath. That doesn’t happen.

This character was given a very weird quality. He thought everything happening around him was due to his lack of sleep or just paranoia, when in London, he showed no such characteristics. I just found Grady not intelligent enough in the entire book. And his reasonings for all actions and sights seen had me rolling my eyes.

He was etched as a bestseller author who was down on his luck so much that he had no money and was living in a 1-star hotel. A fact I found it hard to believe, yet publishers wanted him to write his next book. He was no one-time wonder. So he was sent by his agent to this island to write his bestseller.

The island and its inhabitants were made quirky by the author with an edge of the ominous in their ways of being and in their conversations, barring a couple of people. The writing was supposed to be atmospheric with subplots, and I kept waiting for the darker ambiance to sweep me away and suck me into the pages with it. This too let me down. No twists. Also, the words were not powerful enough to project a vivid imagery so that I would be sucked into the pages.

Strengths

It took me a month to write this paragraph of the review because I kept thinking what the strengths of the book were. The description of an island with quirky characters – maybe that was its lone strength. For me, as a thriller-y gal, I needed the writing to be stronger, making my heart pound in fear or anticipation of what would come next.

Weaknesses

It was surprising that Author Feeney, who had written such great suspense thrillers previously, had written such a watered down story. Believe me, there was a good attempt to make it thrilling, but the storyline was not strong enough. I wondered how the publishers accepted this book as a thriller without wanting some major changes in it.

And don’t get me started on the final reveal. The reason this ball started rolling down the weird pathway was flimsy at best. Apparently, the characters had never heard of communication or divorce. The structure of this thriller was not trickery from the main character where the author’s sleight of hand would make us believe one thing when the opposite was true. It was outright lies in the words told to us readers.

The author forgot one important thing while writing thrillers. Sleight of hand had to be performed subtly which meant the main character’s actions could be interpreted differently while reading. In this, I was told by the main character about the actions he was performing while the reveal showed that the actions were something totally different. He was not even where he said he was. Taking a shortcut in thrillers would make us readers avoid the next book.

If this book was a romance, I would have loved the descriptions of the different scenery and vegetations of this island, with my imagination filling in the blanks. But suspense was a different game. It needed more twists, and something that would require more pizzazz. The worldbuilding was strong but not apt enough for a suspenseful thriller.

Note To Authors – SPOILER ALERT

When you write thrillers, don’t make the main character lie about his actions to us readers. Make him lie to a secondary character in the book, vis-a-vis the cops.

And when you make him lie to us, it is not suspense or sleight of hand. It is called taking a shortcut. In this, the main character tells us he was pacing his apartment worried about his wife to us readers, whereas the final reveal says he was lying on the road to kill his wife at the time when he was telling us readers he was pacing the room. The main character can’t tell readers one action with the format of a narrative directly talking to us, and then say – Oh look, this is the twist. I was not pacing but was waiting to kill the wife. I just lied to you. That was not how thrillers were written.

🤣 I am sure on first reading, I don’t make any sense here. But read the words carefully and think back to your favorite thriller. The twist was when the main character told the other people in the book where he had been when in reality he had been doing something else. Not while talking to us readers.
Or the author hid the timeline in a very clever manner. Writing a thriller was all about real and hidden nuances.

Conclusion And Recommendation of Beautiful Ugly

If your library had the book or you could borrow it free from your friend – go for it. If you wanted to buy it – forget it. Your hard-earned cash could be spent elsewhere.

Have you read this book – Beautiful Ugly? Did you like it? Let me know in comments.

Level Up Your Thriller with Professional Beta Reading

Speaking of gripping thrillers, this is exactly what I help authors achieve through my beta reading services. I know what makes a thriller work – those perfectly-timed plot twists, the mounting tension, and characters that leap off the page. Having analyzed countless thrillers like this one, I offer both beta reading and developmental feedback that helps authors polish their manuscripts into stories that readers can’t put down.

If you’re working on a thriller and want to create that same edge-of-your-seat experience I just described in this review, let’s connect for a beta reading session.

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