Review: Crash Into You (Pushing the Limits #3) by Katie McGarry

Title: Crash Into You
Author: Katie McGarry
My rating: ❤❤❤❤❤
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Release date: November 26th, 2013
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Summary: From acclaimed author Katie McGarry comes an explosive new tale of a romance forged in the fast lane

The girl with straight A's and the perfect life—that's who people expect Rachel Young to be. So the private school junior keeps secrets from her wealthy family…and she's just added two more to the list. One involves racing strangers down dark country roads in her Mustang GT. The other? Seventeen-year-old Isaiah Walker—a guy she has no business even talking to. But after the foster kid with the tattoos and intense gray eyes comes to her rescue, she can't get him out of her mind.

The last thing Isaiah needs is to get tangled up with a rich girl who wants to slum it on the south side for kicks. But when their shared love of street racing puts their lives in jeopardy, Isaiah and Rachel will have six weeks to come up with a way out. Six weeks to discover just how far they'll go to save each other. (summary from Goodreads)

My thoughts: Rachel Young is the perfect good girl. She never misses school, is home before ten every night, always listens to her parents and does everything to make them happy. But beneath that façade, she isn’t that perfect. Instead of liking make-up and shopping, like most girls, she prefers cars. She knows everything about cars. She is a really thoughtful person, always trying to make everyone happy, and putting them before herself, which results in her trying to be whoever her family wants her to be, which isn’t herself. This makes her very unhappy.

   She’s a strong person. Although everyone else thinks she’s weak, it becomes apparent that she isn’t.

   Before Rachel was born, her sister, Colleen, died of cancer, and her family is still struggling to handle it, more than seventeen years later. She has three older brothers and a twin brother. They are all very protective of her, never expects her to be able to handle anything on her own, which makes her feel weak.

   Isaiah is her opposite; lives in a foster home (supposedly), has tattoos and earrings. The only thing they have in common is their love of cars.

   We meet Isaiah in Pushing the Limits and Dare You To. He is Noah and Beth’s best friend, and is in love with Beth. His family is Noah and Beth, but after the events in Dare You To, he’s avoiding her. Now we get to see his thoughts, which, by the way, I found amazing. He thinks of himself as trash, and doesn’t realize that he’s actually not that bad. He’s pretty nice, if you get to know him well enough, but he doesn’t let a lot of people in. He’s very protective of Rachel. Like Noah, he has lost faith in the system, and really looks forward to turning eighteen, although he is worried about how he’ll make it after that.

   He is, just like Rachel, very interested in cars, and works with tinkering with cars. He knows about everything worth knowing about cars.

   Isaiah and Rachel’s conversations about cars (although, admittedly, I didn’t understand that much) almost got me interested in cars. It really amazed me how much they knew about cars, since I know squat about cars and would probably ruin a car beyond reparation if I tried to do anything with it.

   I found Rachel and Isaiah very relatable, just like Echo and Noah from the first book and Ryan and Beth from the second one, and I loved them both. And I have to mention something about the character growth. I love authors who make characters like this, who grows with the book, learns lessons from their mistakes, try to correct them, and do better next time. It makes them so much more relatable.

   The plot was good, and it didn’t get stuck on unnecessary details. It moved along pretty quickly, and a lot of things happened, so it didn’t get boring.

   I both hated and loved the ending, but it wasn’t that obvious, but surprising, which was really nice for a change, since many of the books I read have way too obvious endings.

   And it was engaging. I seriously don’t think I have any more tears to shed, that’s how much I cried throughout the book. Katie McGarry is a really good author, both because her novels are really entertaining, and because they’re really well-written. It’s nice to read an author who has both, and not just one of the two things.

   Pushing the Limits is still my favorite so far, but Crash Into You is not far behind.