Walking Disaster - Review

Walking Disaster (Beautiful, # 2)

By: Jamie McGuire

Published: April 2nd 2013 by Atria Books

448 pages

Source: Publisher via NetGalley (Thank you!!)

( Goodreads | Amazon | The Book Depository )

Goodreads description--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.

I read Beautiful Disaster and I really enjoyed it. I thought the two main characters were an emotional wreck and that they didn't particularly have a healthy relationship. When I started reading Walking Disaster, I thought "well this isn't as bad as I remember. They seem mostly normal." Well...that didn't last too long. I definitely got another dose of "these two cats are CRAZY." But, I still enjoyed it.

As the Goodreads description states, there are two sides to every story. And while, I can promise you that I do NOT want to read every book written from one perspective to be turned around into another book written from the other perspective, I did enjoy it in this case and I think there are a couple of other books I'd be all over (Midnight Sun anyone? IJS!). I felt like Beautiful Disaster was enriched knowing Travis's point of view, what was going on in his head, and how his emotions played into their relationship. The behind the scenes stuff that Abby couldn't possibly know is the stuff that I like most about Walking Disaster.

Along the same lines as the behind the scenes stuff, I enjoyed the epilogue from Walking Disaster. We get a quick peak at where Abby and Travis are down the road. While I think it'd be less than likely that they all of a sudden have a healthy relationship immediately following the ending of Beautiful Disaster, sometimes it's nice to pretend.

Did Walking Disaster change my opinion of Beautiful Disaster? Not really. But that's not a bad thing for me, because even though I can tell the relationship between Abby and Travis is a roller coaster of unhealthy emotions and co-dependency, I still enjoyed reading their story, and I enjoyed reading it again from Travis's eyes. I will say that if I complained about the number of f-bombs dropped in Beautiful Disaster, well you can at least double them because that's a staple of Travis's vocabulary and thought process.

Walking Disaster gets 4 stars from me. Have you read Walking Disaster? If so, what did you think? Let me know!