Review: Walking Disaster

Title: Walking Disaster

Author: Jamie McGuire

Date of Publication: April 2, 2013

Formats Available: Paperback, E-book

Buy This Book: Amazon

Synopsis: Finally, the highly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Beautiful Disaster.

Can you love someone too much?

Travis Maddox learned two things from his mother before she died: Love hard. Fight harder.

In Walking Disaster, the life of Travis is full of fast women, underground gambling, and violence. But just when he thinks he is invincible, Abby Abernathy brings him to his knees.

Every story has two sides. In Beautiful Disaster, Abby had her say. Now it’s time to see the story through Travis’s eyes.

My Review:

After reading Beautiful Disaster, and absolutely loving it, I was thrilled when I saw that there was going to be a sequel, especially because the sequel was going to be from Travis's point of view. I always love the chance to get a look inside another characters head and I was especially looking forward to getting a look into Travis's. Walking Disaster was everything I hoped and dreamed it would be and while I didn't get as into it as I got into Beautiful Disaster I still enjoyed every second of this novel.

Walking Disaster really gave Travis his time to shine. In Beautiful Disaster my feelings towards Travis alternated between love and hate, but in this novel I finally understood what made him tick and by the end of the novel I had a much bigger respect for him than I had at the end of the first novel. I loved being able to see situations that I previously only saw from Abby's point of view from Travis's and there were even a few new scenes that had been glossed over in the first book that we got to see fully from Travis's point of view. One of the things I loved about this novel was the lack of the whole love triangle; Abby's relationship with Parker took up much less time this go around and I loved being able to see more scenes with Shep and Travis's family instead of the countless dates with Parker I previously slogged through.

Travis and Abby have the most possessive and dysfunctional relationship ever and I think that's half the reason I love to read about them so much. However flawed Travis may be his love for Abby is all consuming is as sweet as it is scary; there's part of me that feels overwhelmed by their relationship but at the same time there's a part of me that wants a relationship just like it. Seeing the more vulnerable side of Travis made me love him even more, and dislike Abby even more for being so mean to him. Travis makes a lot of bad decisions, terrible ones even, but I just can't stand the way Abby treats him because of it. Throughout the novel Travis constantly trying to change and be a better person for Abby but while Travis is trying to be a better person Abby doesn't take steps to change at all, making Travis do all the work.

One of the things that irritated me the most about this novel was how back and forth Abby was. Without the context of being able to see into her mind her actions seemed a lot harsher than they had seemed in Beautiful Disaster. Abby hadn't been my favorite character in the first novel but this novel left me particularly unimpressed with her. She's cruel to Travis without any real reason and I hate how she can never just talk to him about how she feels. On the bright side the ending was so sweet and adorable it made up a bit for how much I started to dislike Abby.

Since Walking Disaster is essentially the exact same story as Beautiful Disaster only with a new perspective I didn't get quite as into it as I did the first time around. It wasn't that I liked this novel any less, in fact I probably liked it more, but I already knew what was going to happen and when it was going to happen. Part of the problem in writing the same plot twice is that it takes out the joy of reading it for the first time. I still highly recommend that fans of Beautiful Disaster check this novel out, for the ending if nothing else.

4/5