Full review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books 
 Beautiful Burn by Jamie McGuire is an angsty New Adult romance that takes some of the tropes prevalent in the subgenre and flips them upside-down. Generally speaking, I'm still iffy on New Adult: to me it often feels artificially dark, with characters (generally the hero) who seem "broken" for no good reason. Beautiful Burn has that darkness, but provides a satisfying context for it. It also deals with substance abuse in a serious and thoughtful way. It's a little uneven, though, and it has A LOT of characters to keep track of. 
 I found the details about the hotshot crew fascinating, and the scenes where Ellie is with them, camping on the mountain, were my favorites. 
 I also really liked that the heroine of the novel was the "damaged" one-the billionaire who can only "fuck," not love. The genre is chock full of self-destructive, damaged billionaire heroes-it was nice to see the gender roles flipped. And I appreciated that Ellie's problems weren't resolved by Tyler's magic peen. Her road to sobriety is a hard one-she relapses, she hits rock bottom. Tyler doesn't fix Ellie, but he supports her though her journey even when her substance abuse threatens to destroy their relationship. Ellie's addictions are complicated, not easily solved, and a huge hindrance to her having a healthy romantic relationship. She also has other toxic relationships that she has to sever in order to move on. 
 Beautiful Burn isn't perfect, however; it took me a good quarter of the book to really get invested in the characters and decide that I liked Ellie. There are also a lot of supporting characters to keep track of, and since the Maddox family decides to name all their kids with T's (Tyler, for example, has a twin named Taylor), it was sometimes unnecessarily confusing. I think there were scenes intended to intersect with other books in the series, but to me they felt wedged in and out of place. 
 Fans of darker, angsty romance should definitely give Beautiful Burn a try. For me Ellie's personal journey was as satisfying as her romance with Tyler, and the details about the hotshots fighting wildfires got me past the glut of secondary characters and sections that dragged a bit. 
 - Elyse