The New Adult category, itself, is a new trend, but there's something happening within it that I really haven't seen before. More and more authors in this category are beginning to write and release their books in the male point of view.
The most popular set is probably the Beautiful Disaster series.
Beautiful Disaster totally sweeps you up into it's tornado of intensity and then Walking Disaster is the exact same tornado, except it seems to be spinning the other way. In the first, we're all in Abbie's head, trying to figure Travis out. And then in the second we're privy to Travis's thoughts, and suddenly Abbie seems harder to understand (and maybe it's just me, but she's much more of a bitch than I thought she was), even though we've already heard her side.
Now there are other great New Adult books that bring us into the head of the the dudes we've already fallen so hard for.
Matt was so quiet through most of Flat-Out Love. Now we get to go into his head and find out what he was thinking and why he made certain decisions.
The Slammed series played on this concept, but Colleen Hover did something pretty cool with it. She continued the story from Will's POV in Point of Retreat and then went back to the original story that Slammed told, also through Will's POV. In This Girl, Will is basically telling Layken his side of the story of how they met and fell in love.
Molly McAdams has Stealing Harper coming out in June, which tells the story of Taking Chances through Chase's point of view. Which, if you've read Taking Chances you may know, is an interesting choice, given his role in the story.
Now even Tammara Webber is talking about writing Lucas's story (as she mentioned on Facebook the other day...). It may not be the story of Easy retold from his POV, but if it were, I would love it.
It just hit me the other day, how many of these books are surfacing. And really, when you boil it down, they're the same exact story, with slight variations for what may have been happening off the page in the original book, told from a new perspective. How are these authors managing to repackage a story and sell it all over again? For a moment, I actually felt a little duped. I loved reading Walking Disaster and I'm so anxious to read Matt's perspective. And PLEASE, oh please, let Tammara Webber write Easy from Lucas's perspective. But rather than letting myself feel a little taken advantage of for basically buying the same story twice, I actually stopped to think about why I'm so crazy about this new trend.
And I think it's because I love to re-read books, but I don't have the time to do that anymore. Between my blog and my job, I have so much I need to be reading. So re-reading a book, when my TBR seems to multiply on a daily basis, just isn't plausible. It happens rarely. But with these books, I get to re-read while still reading a book I haven't read yet. It's genius, actually. I get to revisit these stories and get something obviously new out of it. I get to go back to these characters I've grown to love so much and still read something new. I'm loving it.
This isn't to say every book should do this, and there are still books that pull of the multiple perspectives awesomely (Light in the Shadows by A. Meredith Walters and Fall Guy by Liz Reinhardt for example). But every once in awhile, books come along that are as intense as Beautiful Disaster, as beautiful as Flat-Out Love or as heartbreaking as Slammed, and they go straight to your heart and the characters leave their imprints on you. These are the books that you want to go back to, not even just for the sake of seeing what the guy was doing while the girl was freaking out, or what he was thinking when he met her, or what he felt first time they did something naughty together. But because you get the chance to go back to this place and get a fuller picture of something you've already come to love.
So what books would I like to read again from the guy's POV?
Can we hear from Tucker in Give Me Something? Please! I'd love to know his side of this story, especially since he's pretty tricky himself.
And I know Cora Carmack is writing companion novels to Losing It, which I'm SO excited about, but I'd still LOVE to hear from Garrick. I especially want to know what's going though his mind during the "Cat!" moment. (And actually, I DID just accidentally - on purpose - re-read Losing It, last week. Which I know, negates the whole, I don't have time to re-read, thing...but still...It was even better the second time around.)
**UPDATE: We ARE getting to read from Garrick's POV (if there are a certain number of pre-orders of Faking It): http://coracarmack.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-one-that-you-guys-are-going-to-love.html!!**
So my questions for you - what do you think of this trend? And what books would you like to re-read from the guy's perspective?
