NEW ADULT MONDAY: Walking Disaster (Beautiful Disaster #2)

The New Adult genre - their bad boys and big problems and epic loves make them engrossing tales that are so easy to lose yourself in. What's not to love about that? And, now, thanks to the cool chicks at Bewitched Bookworms, we can show these books the love they deserve in a bi-weekly feature - New Adult Mondays.

Walking Disaster (Beautiful Disaster #2), by Jamie McGuire
To be published April 2, 2013
Publisher:  Atria Books
Format: e-ARC provided by NetGalley
Genre:  New Adult Contemporary Romance

 Rating:  4.5 STARS

(From Goodreads) 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.

Walking Disaster was a different kind of reading experience for me. I knew the story. I knew how it began, all the drama that ensued in the middle. I knew how the story ended. And, what's crazy is that by just switching the POV from Abby to Travis, none of that mattered because it felt like I was reading something completely different.

I had to laugh at myself. I swore before starting Walking Disaster that I was going to appreciate the book for what it was and not constantly cross-reference events in my paperback copy of Beautiful Disaster. That lasted until around 15% in to the story. Then, I found myself constantly looking back and forth between the two books. Although I was a little annoyed with myself for giving in to the temptation, I will admit that it gave me more of a frame of reference and made Travis' story a bit richer.

Truth be told, I liked Walking Disaster better than Beautiful Disaster. A large part of that is due to being inside Travis' head instead of Abby's. I found Abby to be a bit insufferable and overly emo at times. She tended to play with Travis' emotions and she had all these thoughts and rarely let him in on them.

Being in Travis' head was like a breath of fresh air. Admittedly, Travis was a bit overly emo at times too, but for some reason I was willing to forgive him for that much easier than Abby. There is just something about being inside the guy's head, isn't there? We all expect the girl in the story to have all these thoughts and feelings and such. But, guys are so much more complex. It takes them longer to get with the program, usually. Interestingly, when we read Walking Disaster, we can see that this wasn't necessarily the case in this relationship.

Although this was the same story as Beautiful Disaster, we did see some new things. Specifically, we saw a lot more of Travis' dad and brothers, especially Trent. I really liked that. There's also an epilogue that takes place a bunch of years in the future, and that was especially fulfilling.

Walking Disaster was all the best parts of Beautiful Disaster (TRAVIS!) and almost none of the worst. If you loved Beautiful Disaster, you will really love Walking Disaster. If you had some issues with Beautiful Disaster, I recommend you give Walking Disaster a try. Never mind that it's the same story - it is still a different experience. And a better one, in my opinion.