Cruel and Careless by Bailey Nicole | Book Review
A dark story with a light heart. Strong themes that are handled with care.
Book Blurb
Cruel and Careless is the first book in Bailey Nicole’s Worthless Boys series, and it earns its content warning. This is a new adult MM romance about two boys who are barely holding it together: Ben cycling through a routine of smoke, drink, sleep, repeat, and Damon who has decided he’s nobody’s savior but somehow can’t stop showing up anyway. It’s messy and co-dependent and honest about what addiction and survival mode actually look like at that age. I started reading this book in 2022 to write this review and never finished it. Coming back to see it through was worth every page.
Book Review
Cruel and Careless is the first book in Bailey Nicole’s Worthless Boys series. The young adult headspace won’t be for everyone. If you need your characters to make reasonable decisions or have functional coping mechanisms, this one will frustrate you. But if you can meet Ben and Damon where they are, that messiness is the whole point. I read this book to write this review in 2022, but I never finished it. Coming back to reread it for the review was worth it in the end.
The thing this book does really well is capture what it actually feels like to be young and not have it together — that specific hopelessness of not being able to see past tomorrow, let alone five years from now. Ben and Damon don’t have the tools to be good for each other, and they are inadvertently cruel and careless with each other. Their relationship is co-dependent and messy and real, and somehow that makes it more romantic, not less. When Damon decides he’s keeping Ben, you feel it, not as a grand gesture but as a quiet, stubborn certainty that this person is his.
The addiction storyline is hard to read in the way that good, honest storytelling about addiction always is, because you know it’s not going to be clean or linear. The author doesn’t flinch from that, and it earns the emotional payoff when it comes.
Teddy, as a side character, also quietly steals scenes as he secretly pines for his best friend, Liam. By the end, you’ll be ready for his book. If you like emotionally heavy MM dark-adjacent romance that earns its happy ending the hard way, this is for you. It’s not a dark romance in the traditional sense — there’s no power imbalance or danger from the love interest — but it’s not a light read either. It sits in that emotional middle ground where love is real but complicated, and growing up is harder for some people than others.
Four stars and a genuine recommendation — especially if you’ve been sleeping on this one since 2021. Now I need to know what happens to Teddy in Book 2.
Cruel and Careless and the Worthless Boys series by Bailey Nicole is available on Kindle Unlimited.
Have you read the Worthless Boys series? Did Teddy’s story deliver? Drop a comment for me. I’m heading into book two, and I need to mentally prepare.
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