Book: Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Today I finished my book it is about the two main characters, a boy named Lucius Wolfe who is starting in a new high school, after the explosion that blew off his hands and left him with hooks, his family moved, changed towns. And Aurora Belle whose mother has recently died after a long illness, and she and her father need a new start in a place.
I loved the character of Lucius. I thought that, overall, he was very well-drawn with an appropriate level of complexity, although I thought his reasons for mixing the chemicals could have been better explained. Aurora, however, got on my nerves. She was sweet, but really almost too sweet. I also wondered where the grief was for her mother, neither she nor her father seemed much affected by the death of her mother.
The idea of having a teenage boy being a double amputee, but finding love is just brilliant. But I just couldn’t connect with any characters because they weren't developed that well and they didn't grow throughout the novel. I felt like I didn't know Aurora at all and only knew Lucius in the slightest.
While I was reading today I was picturing Lucius’s pain and sorrow for what he’s done, how badly he wants his hands back. “In the beginning I used to look at myself in the mirror all the time, repulsed by what I saw, trying to surprise my own new image by jumping out at the mirror from the sides.”
I didn’t have any problem connecting or understanding the story. Everything the author is trying to say is written in a clear, easy and understandable way. The words she uses are pretty simple and based on the paragraph you can easily understand it and there was no need to look it up in the dictionary.
I haven’t done anything similar that the characters experienced in the book because even though the book is based on the world that we live in, the events in the book have nothing in common with me. The main character in the story blew off his hands so thankfully I don’t want to have experienced anything that he did. None of the events, setting or characters remind me of my life, my life is just too different then the characters in my story.
The author uses a lot of literary features in the story such as: Metaphor (when Lucius first sees Aurora he thinks she is perfection he compares her to a dark angel. “She is some sort of dark angel.) Simile (“her eyes are like the color of serene ocean) Characterization (“Misty is a smaller version of mom, tiny, cute and blond……”) Onomatopoeia (“Baam”) and Imagery (when he is describing his room as some sort of a prison with plain white walls) These Literary features make the story really interesting. And make you want to read more.
The plot, for the most part, was well done. It was very realistic. The story was both similar and not similar enough to the traditional story of Beauty and the Beast. It was like the book was told in a more modern way then the original Beauty and the Beast. The ending was perhaps a bit rushed; I would have liked the conflict to be drawn out a little bit more.
The part of the book that I visualized the best was when Lucius actually kissed Aurora and that he realized that she liked him all along and he never understood that before. She was always the first one to reach out for him. “Yes, her lips taste like salt from the chips, sweet from soda, but I hardly notice that as I drown in the sensation of soft welcome.”
If I could have any character as my friend then would choose Lucius. If we were friends then he wouldn’t feel alone in the whole world and if I could jump in the story I would’ve probably stopped him from trying to create an explosive chemical that is similar to a bomb because he was apparently mad at everyone. Maybe if I was there he wouldn’t have done that. “What happened to me wasn’t an accident. I mean it was an accident that it happened that day, that way. But there was nothing innocent about what I was doing. I was practicing to do harm somewhere, sometime, maybe”
This book is very similar to the Beauty and the Beast book. This is like a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast. In both books the main female characters that are really pretty and popular among other people fall in love with “the Best” in this case it was Lucius, a guy who had hooks instead of hands. Usually no one would even look at them but the female characters feel the attraction and eventually fall in love.
The ending was no surprise at all. It ended exactly as I thought it would. I was a bit disappointed by that because I was hoping for an intriguing ending. I know it was a short book, only 208 pages but I figured the author would have gotten to the point and not waited to the last page to have everything play out.
