Review: An honest story of life, love, living, and learning with the MOST fantastic ending!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 14, 2014
Have you ever heard The Fray's lyric: "Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same"? I feel like that lyric encompasses Beauty in the Ashes to a tee. What a beautiful book! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Micalea Smeltzer, for surprising me in the most fantastic way with the ending to this story. Thank you for taking a risk to make a credible and truly worthwhile statement. Thank you for a gritty, honest, and real storyline about life, love, living, and learning.This book contains so many lessons from which we can all draw snippets of wisdom to apply to our own lives. Beauty in the Ashes portrays love not as a fairytale, but as a real-life experience that takes work and honesty and even then sometimes doesn't turn out as we may have wanted or planned. However, if we hang in there and are open to it, love can save us anyway.I love, love, LOVED the ending of Beauty in the Ashes. It was honest instead of predictable; the truth rather than the fairytale. And yet, when you really look at it, Caelan and Sutton's truth, in the end, does end up being their version of a fairytale. Caelan and Sutton did get their happy ending!I'm so conflicted on what rating to give this book, because I did want a little more in the first part of the book. However, I was enthralled with the ending! 4 stars for the first 2/3 of the book, simply because I would have liked a slower transition and a more fleshed out inner dialogue to describe the evolution of Caelan and Sutton's relationship, but 5 full I'm-in-total-agreement, what-a-fantastic-ending stars for the last 2/3. Overall: 4 1/2 STARS, rounded up to 5 because I'm so thrilled with the ending!**An ARC of this book was provided by the author in exchange for an honest review**