Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate number of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance from the darkness of her past, but when she arrives at college with her best friend, her path to a new beginning is quickly challenged by Eastern University’s Walking One-Night Stand.
Travis Maddox, lean, cut, and covered in tattoos, is exactly what Abby wants—and needs—to avoid. He spends his nights winning money in a floating fight ring, and his days as the ultimate college campus charmer. Intrigued by Abby’s resistance to his appeal, Travis tricks her into his daily life with a simple bet. If he loses, he must remain abstinent for a month. If Abby loses, she must live in Travis’s apartment for the same amount of time. Either way, Travis has no idea that he has met his match.
This first book is told through Abby’s perspective. What I really like about this novel was the fact that I didn’t have to sit and read a chapter or two of back story, The reader is just pulled right into the story right from the get go. Its fast paced passionate, dysfunctional, and down right volatile at times. I have to be honest I wasn’t really a big Abby fan I kinda thought she was a bit of a bitch and the way intentionally or not the head games were played drove me crazy I wanted to jump into the pages and ring her neck. I couldn’t help but route for them though. They are both broken and damaged people who seem to bring out the best and worst of each other. While some of the personality traits of some of the characters were down right alarming the author Jamie McGuire brought up some great points of the social stigma associated with casual sex and how perception is everything.
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 love when you get to flip perspectives and see the story from another point of view, and that’s exactly what you are getting here, Walking Disaster isn’t a sequel but a companion book as it is the events of Beautiful Disaster just seen through Travis’s eyes. You get a tiny bit of back ground at the beginning of this book and you get to see the event that shaped Travis into the man he became. From the minute he meets Abby he is intrigued by the girl he can tell there is something special about her and that she isn’t as squeaky clean as she wants everyone to believe, and he likes that. I felt sorry for Travis in this book, as you watch him struggle through all the emotions he is feeling, he is an angry passionate man that feels everything so magnified that its frightening for the people around him, I wasn’t sure if that was because he never allowed himself to feel that way about anyone outside of his own family or if it was just the depths of his feelings for Abby either way they come together as a perfect storm they love hard, they fight hard, they all but destroy everything and everyone in the process. I also like that the author gave us a little taste at the end a few years down the road a little extra that wasn’t in Beautiful Disaster. All in all I spent a little over 3 days reading both books and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I gave this both of these books a 4 out of 5 star rating
If you would like to purchase a copy of Beautiful Disaster or Walking Disaster by Jamie McGuire you can purchase them at any major retailer online or in store.