Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Released on July 31, 2012

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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.(from Harlequin Teen)

With all the buzz this book got when it was released last year I was excited to dive into it and see what it was all about. It definitely had lots of promise and aspects of things I loved, a bad boy and a good girl, both broken, meet and end up having an uncontrollable attraction to each other. Well, I ended up liking most of it, not as much as I expected to just because of a few minor things that annoyed me.

First the good, it was the type of story that makes you want to read it not just because of the love story going on in it but because you want to see these characters develop, you want to see how they’ll change by the end and become better. You also want to discover the truth about what happens to poor Echo (I loved her name) The girl almost died but she couldn’t remember anything of what happened that night. So we get to see Echo begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together slowly throughout the book and to tell you the truth this intrigued me and kept me engaged in this book much more than the love story. I had this crazy morbid curiosity to know how it all had happened and why? I started to feel I could connect with Echo, I understood her feelings of anger and jealousy towards her father and stepmother, I hated her dad and his wife even at the end, I don’t think I could have forgiven them. GRRRR!!!

Now we do get tons of romance in this one, maybe a little bit too much. As much as I hoped to like that part of the novel it became annoying to me. The book is written from two perspectives, both Echo’s and Noah’s and I did like Noah, he’s definitely the bad boy type, not the good guy with a bad attitude because he’s misunderstood. I mean he drinks, sleeps around, and smokes weed. He’s constantly using crude language throughout the book, so you definitely know who’s chapter you’re reading. Echo’s and Noah’s voices are totally different, something that can be quite tricky to achieve when you have two different perspectives in a novel. McGarry did a great job creating a convincing male voice. I really liked Noah but did I love him? No, even though he was broken just like Echo and had a lot to deal with regarding his brothers, he became a little annoying to me whenever he thought about Echo. It was like some sort of adoration he had for her,like she was a goddess or something, it made me gag a little. I was not of fan of that, and it happens soooo often, he’s just constantly thinking she’s this amazing siren that hypnotized him or something, eeew! I kept rolling my eyes. Besides that, I really enjoyed Pushing the Limits, it actually made me tear up close to the end, so overall it was a great read which I would’ve probably loved if it hadn’t been for the overdone cheesy romance.