Gen had found the perfect man, and moments before her perfect wedding, she bolts out of the window in her perfect wedding dress because she is too afraid to go through with it. As it is her best friend Wolfe, who was almost late for the ceremony, is close by and goes to her rescue. Wolfe had never liked David, Gen's fiancé; he always felt something was off, but still he is a taken aback when Gen asks Wolfe to take her far away. Now.

And I thought Jennifer Probst had reached the apex of her talent with Searching for Perfect, the second instalment in the Searching for series, but boy, was I wrong: SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL is simply astonishing! Heart-wrenching, emotional, with extraordinary insight into the human psyche and relationships, with SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL, the author has crafted an exceptionally compelling read. Ms. Probst is particularly adept at fleshing out mesmerizing characters, and Gen and Wolfe are beyond compare, especially the latter.

Wolfe is charismatic and a bit mysterious; he is a prism of emotions; he is a survivor and as we come to learn more of his past, my heart broke and soared; I completely fell in love with him, and this is what an author should aim to achieve: not tell us that we should love the character but write him in such a way that we simply do. How can you not love a man who is afraid of spiders? The author's skills at depicting relationships have never been sharper: whether the touching family interaction between Gen and her father or the intertwining relationships of David, Gen and Wolfe, which provide as much drama as the best thriller as secrets from their pasts are revealed.

SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL is a thick-ish book and Ms. Probst's smooth and elegant prose and spot-on dialogues make it a very quick read because the author invites the reader as a friend to be privy to the story of those characters. SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL is spellbinding: I had chills, I had lumps in my throat, and I couldn't wait to see what would happen next. SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL touched my heart and my soul as few books ever have before. Jennifer Probst writes life, love and sex, with all its ups and downs, in all its beauty and ugliness, better than reality does. There are some spectacularly touching and beautiful sentences I will never forget. Nothing prepared me for the magnificent SEARCHING FOR BEAUTIFUL; I dare anyone not to cry.