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Beautiful Ugly, a book described like a cat and mouse thriller after a devastated husband gets sent to a Scottish island to focus on overcoming his grief and putting out his next New York Times bestseller. This thriller is taking booktok by storm, was it worth the hype?

Spoiler-free Plotling

In Beautiful Ugly, Grady got the best news of his life: he has become a New York Times best selling author out of London. His dreams have come true, and this is the best day of his life. Until it wasn’t when his wife, Abby, stopped to help a lady laying in the road while she was on the phone with her husband and never to be seen or heard from ever again.

Poor Grady has been overtaken with grief and insomnia after his wife’s disappearance, unable to push out another book like his best seller. His agent gave him his answer: a cabin in a remote island off the coast of Scotland. No distractions, just a peaceful island to focus.

However, there’s something wrong about this island. Aside from there being no men other than himself, it is rumored that people on this island can see ghosts. While already feeling anxious, Grady feels he is being watched by the island’s residents, like he’s being targeted. He will soon discover the secrets of the island.

My Takes

I don’t even know where to begin with Beautiful Ugly. Grady was overtaken by so much grief that he was unable to write so his agent, also his wife’s adoptive mom, sends him to an island to focus. Let’s not forget Grady is portrayed as an attractive and more muscular male, this detail is important. Grady is paranoid and trying to discover secrets of this island with his dog companion (the best character by far) but the writing is full of extra, big words that prolong the point of a sentence. Instead of saying “the jeep was red”, it would be “The modular vehicle is a shade of light colored crimson that reminds me of the sun reflecting on the ocean in a dusky sunset”. Every. Single. Sentence.

Because of this writing, this book was probably 150 pages too long, considering we got to the big twist after page 300. We make little progress over so many pages, it really made me more bored than anything, an audiobook I could set down and walk away from, but return to the same spot if I left it running.

I am not a published author, let alone a popular author, but I feel like the big twist shouldn’t be so out there that it creates a big plot hole in the story. This is where the detail of Grady being attractive and muscular comes into play. I don’t want to spoil the book here, but this is something to remember if you do read it to the end. I was left very confused by the end of it.

Something really important to me here is that this book is portrayed as a “girl power” book, and I think this does have those elements, this made me feel like we tried too hard. We have a simple to understand thriller with plot holes that don’t require a lot of thinking. If a man wrote this book, women would be up in arms like it was an insult. I don’t think this is a story that properly presents “girl power”.

One star since I was able to sit through it, but I did listen to it on 2x speed to get though it faster. I did like the narrator though, he did a great job.