Author: Rebecca James
Published: Allen and Unwin, 2010
Pages: 304
First Line: "I didn't go to Alice's funeral."
Summary: Katherine has moved away from her shattered family to start afresh in Sydney. There she keeps her head down until she is befriended by the charismatic, party-loving Alice, who brings her out of her shell. But there is a dark side to Alice, something seductive yet threatening. And as Katherine learns the truth about Alice, their tangled destinies spiral to an explosive and devastating finale. (Taken from Goodreads)
Thoughts: I had seen Beautiful Malice around but had never paid attention to it. Then someone pointed it out and said it was amazing, so I looked into it, and saw that it was classed as a psychological thriller. I absolutely love psychological thrillers so I just had to get my hands on it.
If I don’t like a book, there is usually at least one thing that I find enjoyable about a book. With Beautiful Malice, I found nothing to like. I don’t know what happened, but Beautiful Malice just did absolutely nothing for me, I did not like it one iota.
The narrative is hard to follow, it’s quite choppy and just when I thought I knew what was happening there is a time shift in the next paragraph and it feels so empty, as though something is missing. It was so weird.
Nothing happens for a really long time in the book and you already know what is going to happen in the end. About 70 pages into Beautiful Malice I was considering calling it a day, but I thought, it had to get better, so I persevered all the way to the end.
I’m not going to lie; the ending was just as awful as the rest of the book. It seemed like the whole book was set up for this ending, but then when you actually reach the ending it was so anti-climactic and it tried to be mysterious and suspenseful but ended up being choppy, and inconsistent. I found it hard to understand what was going on to be honest.
The book is classed as a young adult book but I think it is for the older YA audience as it features older people and mature themes. It's kind of strange that way though, because it has the more mature themes but the writing is very simplistic. And when big words are thrown in it feels like they were just plucked from a thesaurus just because.
My biggest problem with Beautiful Malice is that it seemed so unrealistic and unbelievable. I could not, for one second, suspend my disbelief, as everything just seemed so unbelievable. I couldn’t understand how the events could happen and I couldn’t understand the characters interactions.
There are so many people that absolutely love Beautiful Malice, it just didn’t appeal to me at all. I’m not sure what I had expected from Beautiful Malice, but whatever it was, I just didn’t get it.
Source: Library
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