Book Review: Walking Disaster (Beautiful #2) by Jamie McGuire

The blurb as seen on Goodreads:
Release Date: April 2, 2013
Publisher: Atria Books
433 Pages

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.

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I was an infantile asshole that had the emotional control of a three-year-old. 

The above quote came directly from our main character and no truer words have ever been said. So then comes my question, why are people so in love with him? 

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 No, really. I want to know because I really don’t understand how people can love someone based on the this:

She usually got her crap and left right after I bagged her. – really, bagged? 

Her indifference was exactly why Megan was one of my few frequent flyers. 

She had the hair of a porn star, and the face of an angel. – definitely how I’d want to be described

Pigeon was the total opposite of the girls I’d met at Eastern, and I had to know why. – how do you know this? You’ve had no interactions. You’ve seen her once before. Your instalove is invalid

A warm feeling – probably just the insane urge to throw this girl on my couch – came over me.

“Nah. I’m going to see if I can get Abby on the back of my bike again. It’s the closest I can get to the inside of her thighs.”

“Haven’t you ever made out with someone, Travis? Haven’t you just messed around without letting it get that far?” That was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. “What’s the point in that?”

My heart had been back and forth between leaving Abby alone and deciding it was okay to pursue her more times than a freshly single sorority girl on the second floor of a frat house.

Abby bent over to push the turkey into the oven, and my morning tendency to protrude through my shorts had even more of a reason to do so.

Oh yes, he’s a keeper.

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 Anyway…

I honestly don’t think I can write an actual review on this book because there’s hardly any new material. This book is about 90% recycled from Beautiful Disaster. I’m not kidding. Even the characters are recycled. Shepley and America are the same person, one just has a penis. Travis’s thoughts are exactly the same as Abby’s. He seems to be psychic when it comes to what she’s thinking. 

I went in giving this book the benefit of the doubt, hoping it would bring something new and not just be the disaster that the first one. But alas, I was horribly wrong. This book is the worst depiction of what a relationship should be. Everyone is codependent and overdramatic, not to mention Travis’s violent reactions to EVERYTHING. 

And Mrs. McGuire, please learn about character development and consistency. Abby was just blank. Travis went from world class douchebag to whiny "everything is the end of the world" douchebag. America and Shepley went from “stay away” to “go for it” to “stay away” to “go for it”. Changing people just for the sake of making the story go where you want it to does not work.

Oh and that epilogue...

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 But I guess it was too much to ask for anything to be believable. 

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an e-copy of this book in return for an honest review.