Walking Disaster Review is Up!!

Walking Disaster by Jamie McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

4.5 stars!!

Blurb

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.

Review


I think I would do this review by listing what's new about this book. Well, sort of new. I mean, we all know the story already but this time around, the story is told through Travis's point of view. So what can you expect then from this book aside from the obvious?

1. Travis's back story. Huge difference. It will explain quite a lot about Travis. The prologue starts right off with an event that totally changes Travis.

2. Travis and Sheply. We see more interactions between them and we get to understand the dynamics of their relationship. And strangely enough, we get to see another side of America here, too.

3. More of Maddox men. Four of them to be exact -- well, five, if you count their father, Jim.We get to see more of Trent here and a huge revelation about Thomas at end, which could be a segue way to Thomas and Trent getting their own stories. The relationship between the boys and their father was touching. They will make you laugh, cry, cringe and mother the heck out of them. This was probably my favorite aspect of the book.

4. The fight scenes. One thing I noticed about this book is the amount of details Jaime McGuire had put in to make the fight scenes believable. Nothing too in-your-face graphic but graphic enough for the readers to get a clear picture of what's going on. Kudos to the author for not shying away from writing the fight scenes and doing a decent job of it.

5. The Epilogue. Epic. I love epilogues and this one has quite an epilogue, set 11 years after the end of Beautiful Disaster. That earned half a star for me, which totally upped my rating from a solid for a 4.5 stars.

Overall, Walking Disaster delivered on giving us Travis's side of the story. It was nice to see familiar characters and not so familiar ones being reintroduced and introduced once again.

Sadly, I didn't like Abby much here. I did love her in Beautiful Disaster. But seeing everything through Travis's POV, some of the things that she did and said were just cruel, and reading Trav's reaction to them was just painful. I was glad I re-read Beautiful Disaster prior to starting this one because Abby would have killed the book for me.

If you love Beautiful Disaster and Travis Maddox, this book will just make you love him more. I would suggest though that before you pick this one up, read or re-read Beautiful Disaster first. Trust me, it helps a lot. This book would make much more sense if you read Beautiful Disaster first.




*This ARC was provided by Atria Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.









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Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've read enough reviews for this book to know that there are those who really loved it and there are those who really hated it. No middle ground. Either you love it or you hate it.

Personally, I loved it. There's something about the story of Abby and Travis that resonated with me. They both equally frustrated me at and was frankly appalled by some of the decisions they made throughout the whole book which made me want to smack them both in the head. But I still fell in love with these two very flawed characters anyway. Yes, I feel no shame whatsoever in admitting that fell hook, line and sinker for their love story.

At the very beginning, the odds are stacked against them. Abby is running from her past, trying to deny who she is when she meets Travis. He was all wrong for her of course. He's the epitome of the past she was running away from. She resisted but before long she was thoroughly and utterly in love with him. Her denial for her feelings for Travis frustrated me a bit but I can certainly understand where she's coming from.

I loved Abby. She's tough and vulnerable at the same time, and while she had her moments of indecisiveness, I can't help but root for her. I mean, come on, she's supposed to be 19 years old. She's allowed to have those moments. I can totally see why she did what she did considering her back-story -- alcoholic mother and a father who humiliated and rejected her publicly. It's no wonder she was fighting tooth and nail against her feelings for Travis.

As much as I loved Abby, I wasn't quite sure about my feelings about Travis at first but I have come to love him as well. But there are things that he did in the book that were just a no, no for me but like Abby, I find his character totally irresistible. He is crazy intense, crazy passionate, crazy impulsive, and yes, just plain crazy sometime but he can also be so sweet. Love him or hate him, Travis is a complex and interesting character and I can't wait to get into his head in the next book.

I like the pacing of this book. No dull moments for me. The secondary characters just add to the whole appeal. Overall, Beautiful Disaster delivered a satisfying love story that I will not soon forget.

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