Review: Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry
Hardcover; 384 pages
Expected publication: July 31, 2012 by Harlequin Teen

GoodReads † Amazon

So wrong for each other...and yet so right.
No one knows what happened the night Echo Emerson went from popular girl with jock boyfriend to gossiped-about outsider with "freaky" scars on her arms. Even Echo can't remember the whole truth of that horrible night. All she knows is that she wants everything to go back to normal. But when Noah Hutchins, the smoking-hot, girl-using loner in the black leather jacket, explodes into her life with his tough attitude and surprising understanding, Echo's world shifts in ways she could never have imagined. They should have nothing in common. And with the secrets they both keep, being together is pretty much impossible.  Yet the crazy attraction between them refuses to go away. And Echo has to ask herself just how far they can push the limits and what she'll risk for the one guy who might teach her how to love again.

Pushing the Limits has everything I look for in a young adult contemporary romance. Characters you can empathize with, an engrossing plot, sexual tension, pacing, structure, depth—it was all there for me.

The romance takes the front seat in Pushing the Limits, but it isn’t all there is to the story and I loved that. Both Echo and Noah have their personal issues that they’re dealing with, and they deal with them very differently. Their actions and circumstances make them opposites but in many ways they are a lot alike. I enjoyed watching them push through their problems, together and apart. The secondary characters were great as well, and I’m looking forward to reading Beth’s story (Dare You To).

While this book is ultimately a romance, the plot is raw and engrossing. There is nothing sugar-coated about Echo and Noah’s lives.  Their circumstances were very believable, but they were also done in a way that didn’t feel cliché, as these things can sometimes seem.  It was extremely well-written, and all of the pieces came together perfectly.

There isn’t a single thing I can think of to complain about. Pushing the Limits is the epitome of what contemporary YA should be, and Katie McGarry has made a fan out of me.

There’s a part of the story that has stuck with me, and I feel the need to share a teaser from it.

“Her shoulders never shook. No tears streamed down her face. The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see—the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” –Page 278 

5/5 Stars