Beautiful Boy

Leddy Harper — 2016

One introverted girl. One extroverted guy. One assignment. One afternoon. Then everything changed... "You destroyed me." Novah wanted nothing more than to walk away, never see him again. She was determined to pick up the pieces of her tarnished reputation and move on. Her torture became her muse, earning her well-deserved notoriety for capturing beauty with her lens. She had come full circle. She had it all...until he returned. Nolan found himself surrounded by the grim facets of life, no longer the prominent boy from an affluent family who'd caught Novah's eye. The years had been unkind and left him in the dark, painful trenches of life. He needed her help. Fifteen years can equate to a lifetime of change, neither one the same person they once were. Despite the humiliation, the latent wounds, the missing years...they're destined to heal one another in unexpected ways. "You saved me."

Reviews

Megan Williams@meganwilliams

Feb 24, 2022

Beautiful Boy… Fair warning, this is the kind of book that you open, start reading, and are immediately impacted by the characters, their story, and just the amazing writing of the author in general. No joke, ten minutes into this book and I was in tears, which was a little embarrassing because I was in class and my reasoning for spontaneous crying was because of words in a book. Yet these words have such a great impact when you read them and Leddy Harper did a beautiful job of writing these sentences that I could feel and really connect with. While generally, you might have heard the story of the girl who was wronged by a boy and now she definitely hates him, but this is completely new and interesting take on forgiving the past and being able to move on after experiencing these traumas. I really liked these aspects of healing and the idea that the characters aren’t perfect and definitely make mistakes. Every character introduced has something different about them whether it’s physically or emotionally or even psychologically and this creates this beautiful atmosphere of forgiveness and growth. The best part of this book was the story behind the characters. They definitely had a past and this past inhibited their futures both in different ways. Novah was trying to move on with her life after experiencing a traumatic high school experience by building her photography career and finding the beauty in all of her clients, it seems like she’s got her crap together. But leave it to the past to intrude on the present in the form of an old high school crush. Novah was a really strong character that was troubled by her past and yet focused on the present and her future. I liked that she put on such a strong front and wasn’t catatonic by what happened to her in high school because this created a fiery side to her character that was more appealing than a weak one.