What Beauty There Is | Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my stop on the What Beauty There Is Blog Tour, organised by The Write Reads and Penguin. Thank you to The Write Reads and Penguin for having me be a part of the tour!

So what is the book about?…

When everything you love is in danger, how long can you keep running to survive?

Life can be brutal
Winter in Idaho. The sky is dark. It is cold enough to crack bones.

Jack knew it
Jack Dahl has nothing left. Except his younger brother, Matty, who he’d die for. Their mother is gone, and their funds are quickly dwindling, Jack needs to make a choice: lose his brother to foster care, or find the drug money that sent his father to prison.

So did I
Ava lives in isolation, a life of silence. For seventeen years her father, a merciless man, has controlled her fate. He has taught her to love no one.

Did I feel the flutter of wings when Jack and I met? Did I sense the coming tornado?
But now Ava wants to break the rules – to let Jack in and open her heart. Then she discovers that Jack and her father are stalking the same money, and suddenly Ava is faced with a terrible choice: remain silent or speak out and help the brothers survive.

Looking back, I think I did . . .

My Rating: 3/5 stars

Published: 8th of April

This novel is a YA thriller, following two brothers and their struggle to survive after their mother dies. This novel is a very bleak read, it’s likened to The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and if you’ve read this book you will understand the tone similarity. There is very little happiness and light during this novel, it is snowing, and even the landscape is grey. With this in mind, there are huge trigger warnings in this book, please check out the list on Storygraph or here. If you are struggling at all, I would not suggest picking this book up. March was a tough month for me emotionally, and this book was a difficult read.

I wasn’t at all sure what to expect from this book, from the blurb it seems to start out as a contemporary novel about two brothers struggling to survive, but as you continue to read it seems to turn more to a thriller, with drug money being involved. I liked this mix but ultimately I don’t think it is quite as much of a thriller as I had hoped for. Despite the promise of a hunt for drug money, the money is a very small part of the novel, and takes very little time to complete.

I found elements of this novel to be quite unrealistic too. Jack gets injured a number of times, and despite bleeding *a lot* he seems to just keep getting up again. With that much bloodloss, lack of food and sleep, he should not be able to do as much as he could. Some of the characters do quite unrealistic things throughout this novel, and we have a very strong case of “insta-love” between Jack and Ava, which I always find irritating! Ava is a strange character. I liked her sense of good, and her need to help Jack and Matty. She was brave to stand up to her father the way she did.

Despite these slight irritants I liked the book. I really enjoyed the relationship between Jack and his brother Matty, it was so strong and I was moved by Jack’s devotion to him. I thought the mystery of the novel was well done too. We are never sure exactly what Jack’s father was involved in and exactly where the drug money went, and I liked the creeping mystery that pervades the entire novel.

However I just think that this novel was too dark and depressing for me to fully enjoy it. The violence that Jack suffered and the sadness that permeates this novel was just a bit too much for me.

A huge thank you to The Write Reads and Penguin for having me be a part of the What Beauty There Is blog tour.

Buy the book from Waterstones here

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