This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter 18: Lucky Thirteen

My word, it has been a while. I had to look back to find out what had been happening in the book at the point where I was last reviewing it (it involved Abby standing up to Trav and calling him out, so that actually managed to be briefly enjoyable). Let’s see…

Travis is taking Abby home to meet the family. The place reeks of everybody smoking and of ancient carpet, and one of Abby’s brothers calls Travis an asshat the minute he’s through the door (to be fair, I cannot actually disagree…) but Trav is confident Abby’s going to love his family anyway.

There’s a bit about how Thomas has made it his job for years to ‘calm potential storms’ in the family by being ‘always on the lookout for someone that could potentially rock our already rickety boat’, because they all recognise that ‘Dad can’t take it’ if there are problems. So, major dysfunction and parentification going on there.

Trenton eyes up Abby and gets slapped on the back of the head by his father for it. Abby, meanwhile, recognises someone called Stu Ungar from a photo. (Famous poker player, in case anyone else was wondering, but I had to look that up because McGuire doesn’t really explain it. Is he famous enough in the US that McGuire could reasonably have assumed her readers would have heard of him?) This scores her major points with the family, who are about to launch straight into a poker game, including Travis. Great welcome for a guest there; if Abby hadn’t been a poker fan, she’d have been left twiddling her thumbs through multiple games. (This scene could have been rather better done if the mention of Stu Ungar had led to the boys finding out that Abby loves poker and asking if she wants a game, rather than clearly being about to launch into one regardless.)

Fortunately, it turns out that Abby’s brilliant at poker and wipes the floor with them all. Thomas then recognises her surname and puts it together… Abby is the daughter of Mick Abernathy, a poker legend. This makes her an out-and-out celebrity in the family’s eyes, and they go wild for her. We now get our title grab; it’s a press nickname of Abby’s. Apparently her father gave an interview saying that his luck ‘ran dry’ at midnight on her thirteenth birthday and hers picked up instead. And she grew up playing poker with her father’s friends, who were mobsters.

Abby is looking mortified by all this and Travis and family think she’s the best thing since sliced bread. Travis finds this so hot he makes excuses to his family and heads home with her straight away, where he finds out Abby’s worried she’s mad at her for not telling him. When she finds out he’s actually starstruck, she’s not much happier with that; she left Kansas to get away from being Mick Abernathy’s daughter, which sucked for her. Travis actually does the decent thing for once and promises her he won’t mention it again and won’t tell anyone else.

Later, after Abby’s asleep, Travis gets texted by ‘Jason Brazil’. That clears something up; ‘Brazil’ is clearly his surname, not his first name, so at least that’s less improbable than having two characters with unusual country first names. I do wonder in passing whether that fact gets a mention in ‘Beautiful’, or McGuire put it in only after everyone pointed out to her how unlikely it would be to have a Brazil and an America in the same friend group. Anyway, Brazil is texting to tell Trav that Parker is ‘talkin smack’ about him. Apparently Abby is still calling him and Parker is waiting in the wings to get his chance when Trav screws up… oh, great, sounds like Parker’s going full-on Nice Guy. Brazil also tells Trav:

Sd just now that she told him the other day she was really unhappy but u were kinda crazy and she was worried about when to do it.

Trav, being Trav, immediately jumps straight to wanting to wreck Parker’s car, rather than wanting to speak to Abby and find out whethr she is unhappy and whether there’s anything he can do to make her feel more comfortable. However, he at least manages to keep this under control, so… some character growth has happened! Yay, McGuire! Shepley spots this as well, the next day; he thinks Parker planned this to wind Trav up to send him into a jealous rage that would convince Abby to break up with him. (Sadly plausible.)

Trav then tells Shepley he’s on his way to get a new tattoo, and…

“What are you doing, Trav?”

“What I always said I would do if I met the right girl.”

So it sounds like he’s about to go get the sort of Abs-&-Trav-4-evah tattoo that everyone tells you it’s a terrible idea to get when you’ve just started going out with the person. Shepley tries to talk Trav out of this in case it freaks Abby out, and Trav not only refuses to listen, he tells Shepley he’s going to the jeweller’s store next, to ‘have it. For when the time is right.’ So apparently he’s planning to buy Abby an engagement ring to have at the ready. When he’s nineteen, she’s eighteen, and they’ve only known each other for what seems to be a few months, although in McGuire Time it’s difficult to tell.

Shepley tries talking some sense:

“No time anytime soon is right. I am so in love with America that it drives me crazy sometimes, but we’re not old enough for that shit, yet, Travis. And . . .  what if she says no?”

And, of course, Travis has no intention of listening; he’s on his way to get that tattoo and buy that ring. I’m going to hazard a guess that Abby will, in fact, see all this as super-romantic and not a red flag at all, but we do not find out at this point as the chapter ends here. Huh; that means I actually made it through a chapter review in fairly short order. Amazing what you can do when the dysfunction reduces. Maybe the rest of the book will be like this and I can whiz through it? I’m a completionist and do want to finish it, but I don’t want to devote my life to it. We shall see.