Crazy Beautiful, by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

[coraa]

This is a belated birthday present for rachelmanija. One of the things she's pretty well-known for is writing reviews of awesomely bad books, and she enjoys reading them, too. So I decided to review this book, which is... awesomely something, anyway, for her birthday.

The funny thing? rushthatspeaks, completely independently, decided to review exactly the same book for Rachel's birthday. So I guess that should tell you something! Anyway, their review is here, and I recommend it, because it's very funny. Here's my review, which is a bit heavy on the excerpts, because OMG.

This is a book response of the "OMG YOU GUYS" school, not the "measured and thoughtful review" style. If that's likely to upset you, please do feel free to not read.

Crazy Beautiful is a high school love story between Lucius Wolfe (yes, really), a boy with hooks for hands (again: yes, really), and Aurora Belle (again: yes, really) (I keep wanting to type that as "Adora Belle"), a girl of tremendous sweetness and grace and beauty. It's a romance of the model where the girl is a perfect angel and the boy is a dangerous(ly emo) beast.

It's deeply impressive in its sheer, over the top, WTFery. He has hooks for hands! He refers to her as his Dark Angel! It's kind of amazing.

The book begins... well, let me give it to you from Lucius' point of view:

My arm rises toward my face and the pincer touch of cold steel rubs against my jaw.

I chose hooks because they were cheaper.

I chose hooks because I wouldn't outgrow them so quickly.

I chose hooks so that everyone would know I was different, so I would scare even myself.

Yeah.

Actually, let me back up a step. Crazy Beautiful is written from the alternating viewpoints of Lucius the Emo Boy with Hooks for Hands, and Aurora Belle the Sweet Angel. And let me just say, in the author's defense, that—hilarious quotes notwithstanding—it's not a badly-written book on the sentence or paragraph level. There is the stylistic issue that it's overwrought (wait until you see the way Aurora and Lucius describe one another!), but it's not really dreadfully clunky or anything. But...

Since Lucius has more angst (on account of both romantic longing and HOOKS FOR HANDS), and is the more prone to lengthy internal monologue, we spend a lot more time in his POV. (Or at least it feels that way.) The problem with this is... well... his internal monologues have a lot of this:

I lost everything in the explosion—my father would say we lost everything—so a lot of what I don't have is punishment for that. Also, because we can't afford to replace a lot of things. Also, self-punishment. We could of course afford at least a few posters, but I don't want them. I want to be reminded all the time. I know the world won't let me forget, so I can't let myself forget either.

And:

Of which [my sister] wastes no time reminding me, as she leans across the table after Mom pokes her head into the fridge, and hiss-whispers, "This is all your fault. If it weren't for you, we'd never have had to move in the first place."

Mom's head is still in the fridge and Dad's head is still behind his newspaper, so I don't think for more than a split second before raising one of my hooks and holding it over Misty's head. It's a menacing way to hold the hook. I know this. I've had too much practice this past summer.

I watch as Misty recoils from me, her brother, in horror, as I knew she would. It's its own brand of scary, seeing someone you're related to look at you with such fear in her eyes. It's a look I've seen before.

But I don't care, in the moment. In the moment, I just want to stop being reminded, if only just for a second. I want to take a break from being told that everything in our lives, all the millions of little changes, is my fault. It's all because of me me me.

And:

Gee, if I'd known spilling my orange juice was this effective, I'd have spilled it in Dad's direction every day when I was younger. Then maybe he'd have made time to do things with me like, I don't know, play catch in the yard. Not that I'm complaining or playing the neglected child card. I'll never do that. I know what I've done. I know who's responsible for everything in my life, past, present, and future. Still, a little catch would have been fun, when I still had hands.

WHILE HE STILL HAD HANDS, you guys.

I will take this moment to make a small, hopefully-unnecessary disclaimer. I'm not making fun of double amputees, or people with hooks for hands—or, as may become relevant later, people with mental illnesses, or etc. I am making fun of Lucius and his aaaaangst and his "me me me." Cool? Cool.

So it's a bit of emotional whiplash to wind up in Aurora's head, because Aurora thinks like this:

If there were an award for being the best dad who ever lived, my dad would win it. His recreating my old room means that all my old furniture is here: the white bed with the fairy canopy, the matching dresser on which he used leftover paper from the Cinderella border to decorate the drawers, the sheer white curtains that love to dance in the breeze. I do realize that the fairy canopy and Cinderella accents, like the dog alarm, are too young for me now, but I like familiar things, my brief flirtation with Lindsay Lohan and basic black clocks notwithstanding. And it's been my experience that so long as I have all the hottest CDs, DVDs, clothes, and other things, no one ever seems to notice the rest. My dad also insisted I take this room, even though it's the biggest and would likely be called the master bedroom, because he knows I prefer the morning sun to the dying sun at the end of the day, and this is the one bedroom in the new house that greets the dawn.

The whiplash isn't necessarily a bad thing, partly because Aurora is a completely different character and partly because if the other POV character in the book had Lucius' issues, it would... I don't know what it would be, but I don't think it would be better.

But Aurora Belle—AURORA BELLE, I can't get over that, it's as bad as Lucius Wolfe in the Hilariously Overly-Symbolic Names contest—crosses the line from "sweetness and light" to "are you kidding me?" It's actually not the fairy canopy and Cinderella trim that bothers me—hanging onto childhood is not that believable for someone like Aurora, whose mother recently died of cancer; presumably age ten was a happier time—but... but. Well:

People at my old school, friends, sometimes said they thought I seemed too effortless, that I didn't bother trying to stand out or wearing makeup, like I didn't care whether people liked me or not. But of course I care. It's hard to be a human being and not care if you're liked. Or maybe it's not so much that I care about being liked as that I'd prefer, if given the choice, not to ever be hated by one and all. My mom always said a person needs only one good friend in this world, and it used to make me sad when she'd say that some people don't even have that.

See? She's not artificial! She's just... naturally pure spun sugar.

This is all prelude for the great moment of the book, when they meet. They're on the same schoolbus, both on their first day at a new school. Here, from Lucius' POV, Aurora's entrance:

Entering the bus now is perfection. And it's not just the clothes and accessories, which make her look as though she just walked out of the pages of the coolest back-to-school catalog in the world. It's not that in a world that mostly always looks like black and white to me she's like this shocking blaze of color. It's not any of that. It's that with that cloud of long black curls, she's like some sort of dark angel. And it's that when my eyes meet hers, eyes that are the color of a serene ocean, she gives me a quick smile, a nervous smile.

Immediately, I recognize that she's new too, that she's nervous too.

And I recognize something else: I know her. I don't mean that we've met before, because we haven't. I don't even know her name! I mean that somehow, instantly, I know her.

I've been prepared to say no to everyone all morning, to say "Stay away" to anyone who even thinks of drawing near. But as I see her scanning the bus for a friendly face, I start to move my legs, thinking to offer her a seat.

I would give a lot to see that smile again, directed at me.

It may not be much, but I would give everything I've got.

Sooooo.... on Lucius' end, instant love at first sight. From Aurora's:

The first face I see, outside of the bus driver's, is a friendly one. It's a boy with shaggy hair the color of soft coal and eyes that are the brown of mahogany, turning topaz when whatever morning sun can stream through the grime of the bus windows strikes them. All I notice is his head and that as soon as I smile at him—which is the first thing I do whenever I make eye contact with anybody, just like my mom taught me—his smile is instantly wide open, inviting.

There's something shocking about those topaz eyes—what is it?—that shakes me to the core, makes me shiver even though it's still so hot out in the mornings this time of year, nails me to the floor where I stand at the head of the aisle.

(TOPAZ EYES. Well, mahogany and topaz, which I really didn't think were that similar, but whatever. TOPAZ EYES. A while ago, I declared a moratorium on gold eyes for anyone who wasn't either part elf or an Elric, and this is part of why!)

Back to Lucius' POV:

The Dark Angel doesn't walk like other people do. I'm not sure what the exact word for it is. Floats? Glides? No, I don't think there is a word. Who would have guessed it? All those hundreds of thousands of words in the English language—650,000 to 750,000 words to be exact, not including highly technical and scientific vocabulary—but in the end, language still lets a guy down.

This is the first time I hear her voice. Like her walk, like everything else about her, her voice is different from that of any of the others here. Not a woman's voice exactly, but it is definitely not a girl's voice either. It's soft and low and smoky, but clear as wind chimes somehow.

We are in the same world, but different. And yet, no, I do not resent this, because there is something just so obviously and basically good about this Aurora Belle. She even smiled at me, something no one else in the world would have done this morning. I want what she has. I want that goodness.

I think he might be a bit smitten, no?

Aurora's POV:

I sit here listening to all these new voices swirl all around me and I answer their questions as best I can, smiling brightly, but not too eagerly, all the while. And yet the whole time I'm doing it, beneath the surface I am back with those topaz eyes, more animal than human.

It doesn't happen like that in real life. You don't fall in love with people you've just met for the first time when you don't even know the first thing about them.

And yet here's the scary part, the thing that's like a bolt:

There was an instant connection.

When I looked into those topaz eyes, I did feel like I knew him, at least briefly. But that's still not the scary part; I see that now. The scary part is that in that moment, it was like he knew me.

So, okay, so. They meet on the bus. They're both immediately struck: him by her oceanlike eyes and angelic walk and flowing dark hair, her by his wild, vulnerable animal-like eyes. They both immediately feel a connection, as though they already know one another. They both more or less say to themselves, "I think this is love at first sight!"

Also, there's this weird tangent:

Back when I was recovering after the explosion, I did a lot of reading. And, I freely confess, some of that reading was unusual.

One thing that particularly caught my interest was the subject of mercenaries: soldiers for hire. And the type of mercenary that most caught my interest was the Gallowglass.

Gallowglass, which in Irish means "foreign soldiers," were elite military soldiers living in the Western Isles of Scotland and the Scottish Highlands in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. They were Scots, but they were also Gaels, meaning they had a common language with the Irish. They were retained by Irish chieftains, sometimes as personal aides, sometimes as bodyguards, because as foreigners the Gallowglass could not as easily be influenced by local feuds.

Imagine the greatest personal protection service you can think of all rolled into one person: that is what it is to be a Gallowglass.

(...)

I vow, hearing Shell-Necklace Boy continue to speak now to Aurora Belle in his insidious fashion, that I will become her Gallowglass. Whatever happens, I will stand beside her.

I know nothing about the historical Gallowglass, so I have no idea how badly this mangles it, but I found it frankly hilarious. I mean, this is one of many indications that Lucius is supposed to be a genius (he later describes himself as a polymath), and having been a nerdy kid myself, the retention of weird facts is plausible. But the "I will be your Gallowglass! I will protect you as if you were an Irish chieftain and I was a highlander!" just makes me laugh and laugh.

Anyway! Here's the first major problem (besides the flowery language and Lucius' woezzzz, I mean). It's a love story; they've met; they're attracted; they're in love. What's stopping the book from being over right now, on page... um, fifteen or twenty or whatever it is? Why don't they meet up at lunch, start dating within a week and live happily ever after?

The funny part is, there's a really clear potential answer to this. Lucius didn't lose his hands in an accident—or, well, he did, but he accidentally blew his hands off while trying to make a homebrew bomb out of chemicals he stole from the science lab. So he was an angry, lonely, intelligent kid making a bomb, presumably for purposes of mayhem, only a year or so before. Natural conflict! Aurora could find this out, understandably be freaked out/put off by it, and he'd have to show her that he was really a changed person (possibly while confronting his own inner demons that had led to the bomb-making in the first place) while she tried to figure out if they could both put that past behind them.

Only that's not what happens.

(Side note: Lucius' parents have kind of a bizarre way of dealing with their son who blew his hands off building a bomb. They moved away to get a new start, which makes some sense, if only for the sake of Lucius' younger sister. But they didn't get him any kind of therapy that I can see, or send him to a psychologist, or... or anything. They just basically tell him all the time that he has to shape up Or Else. Given that they are of a socioeconomic stratum that presumably has access to such services, that seems... extremely... misguided?

But it's all of a piece with the book's weird attitude toward Lucius' attempt to build a bomb. I mean, he admits that he had some kind of violence in mind, which, well, duh, although admittedly he didn't have any target particularly in mind, or at least not yet [and I suppose it's possible he had property damage in mind more than hurting people]. But people who, y'know, judge him for building a bomb with at least the vague intent of using it on other people are portrayed as misguided at best, horribly intolerant at worst. And you know what? I think of myself as a pretty tolerant person. But if it turned out that one of my friends or classmates had tried to build a bomb, I think I'd want to figure out if they were... y'know, planning on trying again, before I gave them the Man of the Year award.

Tangent over.)

No, the natural conflict doesn't arise for quite a while. What comes between these two lovers, after their eyes meet across a crowded bus and they realize they're destined for one another?

Um.

That's... an excellent question.

Some of the popular kids call to Aurora, and she goes to sit with them, and she keeps hanging with them at school for... some reason. Lucius doesn't, of course, because he's the weird kid with no hands and also the other kids find out about the 'blew them off himself' thing and think (possibly justifiably!) that he's crazy. So Lucius doesn't approach Aurora because her friends are jerks, and she doesn't approach him because... um... because her friends think he's weird, and even though she thinks they're being judgmental dickheads and she thinks he seems perfectly nice, she still... doesn't... I don't know?

Don't ask me. This is possibly the first great romance I've ever seen that was stopped by the most basic social inertia.

And it's fairly stupid social inertia, too. The three people Aurora meets on the bus are Jessup (the "shell-necklace boy" that Lucius references in his "I WILL BE YOUR GALLOWGLASS!" internal monologue), who is pretty clearly a jackass from moment one; Celia, who is bitchy and clearly hung up on Jessup and would do anything he said; and Deannie, who is a gossip who just goes along with what everyone else says and believes. And the thing is, Aurora knows this: she knows that they're shallow at best and jerks at worst. She doesn't like it, either, and we get treated to several of Aurora's internal monologues on the topic.

If Lucius' internal monologues are focused obsessively on his angst about the hooks for hands (HOOKS FOR HANDS, I may never get tired of typing that), Aurora's are focused obsessively on being nice to people. rushthatspeaks compared her to a Disney Princess (a comparison that invites itself, given her name), and it really does remind me of that: Aurora Belle floats through her life being beautiful and graceful and nice to everyone. Here's the centerpiece of her musings on niceness, a flashback to something her mom told her when she was in elementary school:

That's when my mom gave me a talking-to. This was before she got sick.

"How would you like to be T.J.?" she said. "How would you like to always be getting punished for things, even things that are no big deal? How would you like to get left out of the fun stuff, sometimes just for breathing?"

It was something I'd never thought about before: what it must be like to be T.J. It would be awful. Yes, he was louder than the other kids. Yes, he could be obnoxious too, like the time he spat on me for no good reason. Is there ever a good reason to spit on someone else? But it would be awful to be him, I realized. It would feel sad. It would feel lonely all the time.

"Then don't you be like the other kids," Mom said. "I don't care that the head of the school doesn't like T.J. I mean, I care, but I can't do anything about that. And I really can't do anything about how the other kids act. But I can tell you: you should be nicer to him, no matter what anyone else says or does."

Now, I am a big proponent of kindness. For goodness' sake, Tohru Honda is on my list of 'favorite anime heroines,' and she's just about the nicest person ever. But I honestly draw the line at feeling obliged to be friendly to people who spit on you. That's sort of the Aurora niceness, though: a princessy singing-duets-with-bluebirds Good that's all frosting and no cake.

So why does Aurora remain friends with these jerkasses, given that a) there are presumably other, less jerkassy people at the school she could be with, and b) they're keeping her from her OMG Eyes Met Across The Room Insta-True Love? The book actually does get into that: in the aftermath of her mother's death, Aurora became something of a leaf on the wind. They wanted her to sit with them on the bus, so she sat with them. They wanted to be her friends, so she's their friends.

So, like I said: great romance, derailed by inertia.

Anyway. While these two are being kept apart by... um... by I don't even know what, we wander through a couple of subplots. Lucius makes friends with a young security guard at the school, and helps him find his way into a better job. Aurora tries out for a play, and gets the lead (naturally). Jessup, the jerkass boy who has a thing for Aurora and who is therefore The villain, is randomly a jerkass. Lucius works on repairing his relationship with his younger sister Misty.

The subplots are actually not terrible. In another book, where Lucius was trying to prove to everyone else and to himself that he really was rehabilitated, the time he spends with the security guard would have fit beautifully—and I actually did quite like the way his fraught relationship with his younger sister was handled.

But it's hard to take it seriously in this book, where it's interspersed with sections like... oh, god, I can't even sum up, have another quote:

"Hey," [Jessup] says, as I'm pulling on my gym shorts, "how do you jerk off with those things?"

Funny he should ask.

Yes, guys our age—news flash!—jerk off. I suspect guys of all ages do, pretty much from the age they first figure out that the thing they pee with is capable of doing other things right up until the day they get so old they forget what it's for again. We all do that thing that people used to warn boys not to do, saying it would make them go blind. We do it, in fact, because we're hoping to temporarily go blind. In a way, at least.

All I'll say on the subject?

It does present its challenges.

Life is full of challenges, made more difficult when a person does something stupid, like blowing off his own hands.

Guys our age also fantasize all the time about being with girls. Unless of course we fantasize about being with other boys, but I'm not part of that second we, no offense to anyone who is.

Actually, I've been fantasizing about girls for pretty much as long as I can remember. But I always knew it was fantasy, with no basis in reality. I mean, it's not as if I was ever what you'd call a real popular guy in my old school, not even before I blew my own hands off.

Hell, I've never even kissed a girl.

But I have had my crushes and my fantasies. I have had those. And I even used to dream that one day fantasy would become reality. But how is that possible now?

I've tried to imagine what that would be like now if it ever did finally happen: being with a girl—you know, really being with her. How would I touch her the way a guy is supposed to?

Even the most basic things are mind-boggling. For example, I know everyone's supposed to use condoms these days. It's the thing to do unless you're—oh, I don't know—older and trying to make a baby. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was the thing to do even back in my parents' day—you know, that despite smokers' lounges, walking to school in the snow, free gas, and people liking you if you "just be yourself," condoms were the way to go. But how would the logistics of such a thing work?

Believe me, I have given this a lot of thought. And all I can think is, either I'd poke a hole in the condom with my hook or I'd be so nervous and excited and eager, I'd accidentally cut off my own penis with my pincers while trying to roll the condom on.

Yes, for some lucky girl I will be a real prize ...

I just! I just! "Life is full of challenges, made more difficult when a person does something stupid, like blowing off his own hands." And then of course, there's no way the girl could put the condom on him! No, he'd have to accidentally cut off his own penis omg omg omg.

So the good bits—the relationship with his younger sister, etc—are studded in this matrix of Lucius' aaaaaaaaaangst and Aurora's total obliviousness.

Eventually, sort of by accident, Lucius and Aurora begin to spend more time together. They go to a party together and dance, and have a first kiss. Awwww. We're finally getting somewhere, despite the angst and obliviousness and weird inertia issues! And then two things happen:

First, Lucius tells Aurora that he was building a bomb with the intention of, well, using it. Aurora is SHOCKED and HORRIFIED. I am boggled, because he told her a while before that he'd stolen the chemicals from the science lab and had been making something with them when he blew his hands off. What did she think he was making, new pharmaceuticals? Fertilizer? Rocket fuel? He was an angry and intelligent young man messing with explosive chemicals! I'd think that 'mayhem' would be an automatic assumption! But no, apparently that hadn't occurred to her. She runs off, horrified. Lucius aaaaaaangst. I scratch my head a lot.

Second, Jessup sees Lucius and Aurora kissing, and the Final Plot Complication swings into full gear. See, Aurora's father, Mr. Belle, is the school librarian. Jessup convinces Celia (the girl with a crush on him) to lie and tell the school authorities that Mr. Belle came on to her. He corroborates the rumor, then spreads the story that it was Lucius, not him, that corroborated.

Aurora believes this, despite the fact that she had previously, repeatedly said that the person who passed the info on to her was a gossip who didn't know what she was talking about. So Aurora and Lucius have a falling out, Aurora weeps bitter tears, Lucius aaaaaaaaaaaangst some more, and then...

...Lucius tells Celia he knows she's lying, and she caves immediately and goes to tell the truth. Mr. Belle is reinstated and gets an apology. Aurora finds out that Lucius is really a good guy and saves the day. Um. That was... easily solved?

Jessup, intent on fulfilling his destiny as a mustache-twirling villain, goes after Lucius with a tire iron! And we get this fantastic climax:

The plastic arm of my prosthetic becomes the perfect blocking device as I whirl to face my attacker, my shoulder recoiling as it absorbs the percussive force of the tire iron.

"You sonofabitch!" Jessup shouts at me, swinging the tire iron at my other side.

"Actually," I say, deflecting the tire iron with the plastic arm of my other prosthetic, "my mother is a fine woman."

I don't even mean it to be funny. But if I am to die tonight, I will not have this cretin defaming my mother before fate and circumstances turn out the lights on my life. My mother is a fine woman, who has only been hurt by me. Really, most of the people in my world are fine people, also hurt by me.

Jessup is swinging wildly at me now.

"This is all your fault!" he says. "If it weren't for you—"

"If it weren't for me what?" I continue to deflect each blow, no matter how quickly they come. "If it weren't for me, you would be a better person than you are?" Really, I am so good at deflecting, I think, maybe I should give up pool and take up martial arts. "If it weren't for me, you wouldn't do terrible things?"

Jessup lunges at my stomach with the tire iron and I leap backwards.

"We are all responsible for what we do," I tell him. "If I didn't exist, you would still be you."

Then he disarms Jessup, who crumples into a little pile of woe.

Aurora—who has, in a stroke of totally unbelievable awesome, come to the conclusion that Lucius is her Gallowglass in exactly those words without him ever telling her the word—rushes to Lucius. They kiss. The end!

This book is honestly kind of amazing. There's a built-in conflict (that Lucius had decided to, I don't know, BLOW STUFF UP out of angst) that isn't really used much; there's a villainous jock boy; there's no real obstacle between our lovers. But it's really Lucius that makes it, with his weird tangents about GALLOWGLASS and his insistence on thinking of Aurora as Dark Angel, and, and, and. And. I just. OMG.



Now, after all that, I'm sure you're expecting me to say 'not recommended.' I'm not going to. It's actually kind of fabulous, in a 'wow, I can't believe this' kind of way. I was thoroughly entertained, entertained enough to read it through twice in the process of writing this review. It's so thoroughly and completely out there, so over the top, so HOOKS FOR HANDS and DARK ANGEL and I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS that I think some of you might, actually, enjoy it. I do not regret reading it, for one!

EDIT: octopedingenue has a hilarious review also, here. I recommend!