Trash Turned Mystery: Unrivaled

Review: Unrivaled by Alyson Noel

Title: Unrivaled (Beautiful Idols #1)
Author: Alyson Noel
Pages: 420
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Publish Date: May 10, 2016
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller

Synopsis: Everyone wants to be someone.
Layla Harrison wants to leave her beach-bum days for digs behind a reporter’s desk. Aster Amirpour wants to scream at the next casting director who tells her “we need ethnic but not your kind of ethnic.” Tommy Phillips dreams of buying a twelve-string guitar and using it to shred his way back into his famous absentee dad’s life.
But Madison Brooks took destiny and made it her bitch a long time ago.
She’s Hollywood’s hottest starlet, and the things she did to become the name on everyone’s lips are merely a stain on the pavement, ground beneath her Louboutin heel.
That is, until Layla, Aster, and Tommy find themselves with a VIP invite to the glamorous and gritty world of Los Angeles’s nightlife and lured into a high-stakes competition where Madison Brooks is the target. Just as their hopes begin to gleam like stars through the California smog, Madison Brooks goes missing. . . . And all of their hopes are blacked out in the haze of their lies.
Unrivaled is #1 New York Times bestselling author Alyson Noël’s first book in a thrilling suspense trilogy about how our most desperate dreams can become our darkest nightmares.

I finished this book last night, and my thoughts are still so scrambled on this book. Please bare with me on this review, I'm going to try and give you coherent thoughts but you know how this is. Unrivaled messed me up. I didn't know what to do when it was over because that ending basically gave me nothing. But I'll get to that later.

Honestly, I hate mysteries. Especially when they aren't written like mysteries. Unrivaled started off as that perfect trashy novel about living in LA that every girl secretly reads, but then halfway through it Madison Brooks, the top teen celebrity, disappears.

You don't get answers

I still have no idea what happened to Madison Brooks. I still don't understand why the story took that spin of a disappearance. It was fine where it was headed, Madison is a sneaky celebrity, Layla, Tommy, and Aster are promoting the clubs. There was enough drama for it to just be a nice contemporary that reminded me of the LA Candy series by Lauren Conrad. But nope, it had to be a mystery.

Someone was arrested and I still don't know how or why. It was confusing as hell. In the last few chapters, you'll be wondering what was going on. I read it, someone was arrested for the disappearance, I just have no idea.

Why was it that person? What even happened to Madison? What's with the whole sex tape? There is no answer to these questions, and I get that it's part of a series, but I don't think I want to continue.

It shouldn't have been a mystery

Or if it was, a lot of important details were left out. New characters were introduced, old characters were having odd changes to their personalities. It just made no sense. Mysteries have important details that when given to the reader, they are seemingly unimportant. Nope, all of this stuff was just skipped over.

I still have no idea what the hell was going on.

The mystery part was delivered badly. The trashy LA part was delivered perfectly. The characters were great, nice and well-rounded until Madison Brooks disappeared. Then, they turned to trash and I felt as if I didn't know them anymore. I was curious in the whole being-a-nightclub-promoter thing, but that was pretty much dropped.

I liked the beginning, but the ending, to put it simply, sucked. There were no answers, it was majorly confusing, and it wasn't given well to the reader. Even though I sped through it, I didn't like it. It was nice and quick, just not for me.