A review by ajones623
Beautiful by Amy Reed

3.0

I read Reed’s other novel, Clean, last year and decided that she had a lot of potential. Clean read like an Ellen Hopkins novel which are always intriguing and (almost) never fall flat. However, Beautiful did not add up to what I thought, and hoped, that it would be. The novel revolves around the life of 13 year old Cassie. Cassie, the new girl in school, wants nothing more than to fit in with the “cool” kids so she changes her entire image to catch their attention. No surprise there, it’s what happens in a lot of novels, movies and television shows these days. It’s not just her image that she changes though, Cassie pulls out all the stops, easily giving in to peer pressure and shedding her virginity without a single thought. From her first weekend at her new school onward her life continues in a downward spiral in which neither her mom or dad notice how bad things get. Of course, everything that could happen to Cassie does. She let’s an older guy convince her to have sex with him, she lets her “best friend” convince her to do acid and smoke pot, she doesn’t blink an eye when she’s at a party and her friend emerges with a bag of cocaine and she keeps going back for more, her uncle comes on to her and the list just goes on and on. It’s hard to believe that everything that happens really happens in the span of one school year. That jacket praised Reed and claimed that Beautiful was this generation;s Go Ask Alice. I don’t agree with that statement. Go Ask Alice really illustrates how drug addiction, alcoholism ad depression are diseases and affect a person negatively; the novel doesn’t end by putting a nice, neat bow over everything. However, Beautiful tries to do that. Cassie, somehow, dumps her violent best friend, her drug habit and her boyfriend and is on her way to being a better person, as if she wiped the slate clean and could forget everything that happened in the past year. It would have been nice to see Cassie have more consequences for her actions, you can’t put a pretty bow on life.