Reviewed by Sarah Bean the Green Bean Teen Queen for TeensReadToo.com

A beautiful girl meets a boy with hooks for hands in a modern re-telling of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

I devoured this story. CRAZY BEAUTIFUL is one of those books you want to curl up and read in one sitting. The cover is gorgeous, but I was expecting a more intense story, I think, with older characters. (The characters are 15.) Instead, we get a look at a sweet story of love and friendship between two fractured people.

Lucius experimented with chemicals from school and caused an explosion which cost him his hands. He's chosen hooks and has set himself up to be an outcast at school - which he is, except when it comes to Aurora.

Aurora has recently lost her mother to cancer and now she and her father are starting over in a new town. She's genuinely nice and I really did feel like she was a wonderfully sweet person - she wasn't annoyingly perfect and nice - she was real.

I loved Aurora's relationship with her father - I love seeing strong family dynamics in books and Aurora and her father have a great relationship. This contrasts with Lucius and his parents, who have lost trust in him. Yet, I can't say theirs is a negative family dynamic, as their family is struggling to recover from the accident and it's written so perfectly - you feel their struggle. I really liked the relationship between Lucius and his younger sister, Misty - the scene at the mall is one of my favorite sibling scenes ever!

There's so much in this one - it's a tale of friendship, romance, jealousy, and starting over. It does justice to the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST story and it reads like a lovely fairy tale. It's told in alternating viewpoints with each chapter, and I liked how things from each chapter would bleed over into the next character - both are served orange juice for breakfast, both characters will use the same word. It was very clever and I liked looking for the things that connected them.

I'm most impressed with how author Lauren Baratz-Logsted could manage to say so much without going into great detail. She doesn't need to write long descriptive paragraphs about what's happening. Some chapters are only a few sentences long - but the characters have depth and their relationship is believable.

The only complaint that I have was that I wish it would have been a tad longer - the ending felt a little too rushed. Overall, though, CRAZY BEAUTIFUL is definitely one to look for.

Side note - As a librarian, I really loved how Aurora's dad was a librarian and Aurora was a book lover. It's always good to see librarians get a shout out in books. For some reason, he reminded me of Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which made me smile as I was reading it. Gotta love librarians!

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At 197 pages (at least that was the length of my ebook), this was a short read that I read in a couple of hours. The narrative goes back and forth between Lucius and Aurora's points of view, but they are very short passages, sometimes just one sentence. There's a sort of poetic quality to the writing, as if sentences are used sparingly for maximum dramatic effect.

This is a Beauty and the Beast tale, but there's a lot more going on than this (although it's one of my favorite tropes). The way it was written, it conveyed high school and family in a believable way. Lucius is an outsider but he didn't strike me as a real bad boy, despite what he'd done (and this book's cover). His attitude was more of an intelligent guy who is marginalized by others, but I liked how Aurora trusted her own judgment in him. There's the idea of starting over, which both Aurora and Lucius have to do, going with or against the crowd, rumors, the consequences of your actions and a really sweet romance. And had a couple of laughs at Lucius's sarcastic sense of humor, especially when he goes shopping with his younger sister and is forced to discover how pitiful his fashion sense is.

When I look at other reviews for this book I see people wanting more to the story, wanted to see more of what happened after it ended, but I didn't have so much of that problem just because I knew that the book was short, and I guess I had that in the back of my mind. I think I ended liking it better than them. The only minor complaint I'd have is wanting to know a bit more about what Lucius was up to when he blew up his hands. It takes a while before we get there and when we do, his reasons behind it weren't delved into and I wish they were, but maybe this book didn't want to focus on the past as much as focus on moving forward.

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