Audiobook Review: Beautiful Bitch

Title: Beautiful Bitch (Beautiful Bastard #1.5)
Author: Christina Lauren
Format: Audiobook, 3hr26min.
Narrators: Grace Grant & Kirby Heybourne
Pub. Date: July 9th 2013
Source: Once Upon A Twilight blog

★★★

Three stars.

Beautiful Bitch is a short novella that is meant to follow the book Beautiful Bastard. Bennett and Chloe have just reunited after a time apart, at a time when Chloe's getting a new career, but Bennett refuses to let her go. I will be reviewing the audiobook version of this story.

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Right off the bat, I'd like to say that I have not read Beautiful Bastard, though it is on my to-be-read list. I feel strongly that if you haven't read the first book, you shouldn't read/listen to this novella as I did.

I didn't feel as though I got to learn anything about the characters. I'm sure that if I had read Beautiful Bastard, that wouldn't be the case. But throughout Beautiful Bitch I felt disconnected from both sides of this couple, and I wasn't really emotionally invested in their story.

That being said, the steamy scenes were well written and very tempting. A few times the story would begin to heat up only to stop suddenly, teasing the reader. The writing in this book was by no means bad, though there were a few more "fucks" than necessary, in my humble opinion.

To continue from that, I wish that I had gotten a print or ebook copy of this instead of an audiobook copy. To be fair, I am picky with my audiobooks in the first place. But hearing a male reader narrate sex to me was just kind of awkward, and I wanted it to stop. Nothing personal against the writing or the reader on the audio, just my own quirk apparently that I don't want erotica playing aloud from my computer. Lesson learned.

If you loved Chloe and Bennett in Beautiful Bastard, by all means give this story a whirl. You might love it. But as someone unfamiliar with the first book, this was a short and admittedly steamy narration that was simply okay. If you didn't read Beautiful Bastard, I'd recommend skipping this for now.

Thanks to Once Upon A Twilight for my audiobook copy.