I’m not sure I can express how much I hated Beautiful You, but I’ll try.
I normally take any Palahniuk story with a grain of salt and tongue firmly in cheek, but this was just a bridge too far. I hated all the characters, the entire premise wasn’t smart, funny, satirical or the least bit meta. Honestly, anyone who thinks this book is any of those things is a complete dolt.
The really sad part is, I kept waiting for everything to turn around and become the clever mockery of quasi-feminist presumptions about what the modern woman wants, but it never happened. The writing was atrocious, even by Fifty Shades of Gray standards and the supposedly erotic passages could have been written by a 13 year old boy for how much it seemed to understand what really turns women on, which is I guess what Palahniuk was aiming for.
It’s no secret that Palahniuk revels in low humor and adores poking fun at male and female stereotypes, but this was such an abject failure I can hardly bear to think about it long enough to write this review. Don’t read it. Period.