#CBR8 Book 55: "Walk the Edge" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 448 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Thomas Turner, better known to his fellow Reign of Terror motorcycle brothers as Razor, is conflicted. He wants to be unquestionably loyal, but when a police detective reveals new information about his mother's death, he can't leave the case alone, despite warnings from his father and other gang members. Having always believed she committed suicide, he's compelled to find out whether the Reign of Terror were in fact involved in her alleged murder.

Breanna Miller has always felt like an outcast, both in school and at home (she is the middle child of NINE siblings). She's super smart and dreams of going away to an elite school, where she's even managed to secure a scholarship, but is denied the chance because her parents need her at home. Her parents rely on her to help take care of her younger siblings and generally seem to ignore the fact that time and again, Breanna gives up on her dreams because of her family. Her only friend, Addison, has a lot of problems of her own, and as such, isn't someone Breanna feels she can turn to.

Like everyone else at school, Breanna is initially afraid of Razor, and there are all sorts of rumours about what the members of the Reign of Terror have to do to patch in. After Razor helps her out one afternoon when her brother's forgotten to pick her up, Breanna starts wondering about the mysterious Thomas Turner, and soon the two can't stop thinking of each other. Breanna's brain is constantly looking for puzzles to solve, and Razor just happens to have some messages in code that could help him figure out what really happened to his mother.

Once Breanna realises that a) Razor is not the dangerous criminal she feared, but actually a very smart and chivalrous boy and b) contrary to what she expects, he doesn't find her a brainy freak, but is fascinated by the way her brain works,, she starts warming up to him. Unfortunately, someone snaps a picture of the two of them, which out of context looks really salacious, and uses it to blackmail Breanna. She's terrified that the picture will be leaked on social media, potentially ruining her chances to get into college and away from her smothering family.

There is frequently an opposites attract, protagonists from different worlds theme in Katie McGarry's books, and this one is no different. Razor is the close-mouthed, emotionally closed-off loner, a motorcycle-riding bad boy with a dangerous reputation. He's grown up among members of the motorcycle club, and would never conceive of trying to leave them to live a different life. He's always wondered if his father's love of women was partially responsible for his mother killing herself, and once he discovers that his mother's death wasn't a suicide, but that she was quite possibly run off the road, he can't stop digging into the case, no matter what the older Reign of Terror members tell him.

Breanna is a loner in a different way, and despite her large family, feels like she has no one to turn to. The fifth of nine siblings, she is seen as an annoying younger sibling by the four eldest and as a nagging older sibling by her four youngest. Because she's extremely smart and well-adjusted, her parents constantly ignore her to prioritise more pressing needs in the family and rely on her for babysitting duties. She's denied her wish to go away to a prestigious private school because her parents, who both have to work full time to support their giant family, can't spare her. At seventeen, Breanna is pretty much raising her younger siblings, and that is not a job a young girl should have to have.

To add to her troubles, the star football player wants to pay her to write his essays for him, and when she continues to refuse, he manages to secure an incriminating photo of her and Razor together. The fact that nothing at all happened is completely irrelevant. The photo is snapped at exactly the wrong moment, and Breanna is worried that she's going to have to agree to the douchewad's demands, in order to make sure her future isn't ruined.

I have yet to find a Katie McGarry book that I don't like and she tends to do excellent pairings, with deeply likable protagonists, often in interestingly fucked up situations, who find solace in each other. In this, I was furious at Breanna's parents, who so selfishly kept reproducing and expecting their children to pretty much raise each other. I honestly don't understand how Breanna's mother, who works as a nurse, could ignore contraception in such a way. As far as I could tell, they were not religious nuts who believed safe sex was a sin. Who has nine children, when it's quite clear that they can't support said children both financially and emotionally? They completely ignore Breanna and all her troubles during the first part of the book, only to go mega overboard on being protective in the second half, once they discover she's been dating a biker. They made me really angry.

The "we know best, just never ask any questions" attitude of the older Reign of Terror bikers was also pretty frustrating. As they are clearly set up as law-abiding and above board, despite all the rumours in the local community about them, it was obvious to me that they hadn't conspired to murder Razor's mother, but their complete inability to be open with him, and insistence on blind, unquestioning loyalty, even when the kid is clearly struggling, was baffling to me.

While I care about as little about motorcycle gangs as I do sportsball players, I am a sucker for well-written, emotionally resonant romance. Because this is YA, there aren't really any smexy times, although there is some pretty impressive UST and some great smolder and kisses. McGarry keeps delivering books that hit me right in the feels, even when some parts of the story annoys me. I will eagerly await the next book in the series.

Judging a book by its cover: There are a number of different covers for this book, all of them variying degrees of meh to awful. The version I read actually had a pretty decent cover, which fits with certain scenes in the story. A blond guy in black jeans and a white t-shirt, walking along the train tracks on a railway bridge - this could be a scene of Razor in the book. Several of the key scenes in the story take place near just such a bridge, so I think it's quite fitting, and much better than say, the headless couple leaning against a convertible (had it been a motorcycle, it would have fit better) or the badly photoshopped couple embracing, while pouting out of the image that make up the other two covers of the book that I have seen.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR7 Book 74: "Nowhere But Here" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 4 stars

I got this review copy from NetGalley in return for a fair and unbiased review. The book is available now. 

Emily lives a nice, safe, uneventful life with her mother and adopted father Once a year she meets up with her biological dad for an awkward day, usually spent shopping, but she tries not to think too much about him or his side of the family. After all, he willingly signed away his parental rights and wanted nothing to do with her as a baby, right? However, when her mother receives word that Eli (her bio dad)'s mother has died, she insists they have to return to Kentucky for the funeral. What they discover there turns Emily's life on its head and challenges everything she ever believed about herself, her mother, Eli and his family.

Oz has wanted to be a member of the Reign of Terror, motorcycle club that Eli is a leading member of, for as long as he can remember. He's finally turned 18 and is eligible as a prospect for the club, when Emily bursts into his life and complicates it massively. For reasons no one wants to explain, a rival MC gang are trying to get to Eli through Emily, and Oz is tasked with keeping her safe. While he finds her easy on the eyes, she's also a total pain in his butt, and no matter how pretty she is, hooking up with the boss' daughter is a terrible idea. Emily also turns her nose up at everything Oz loves and admires, so just as he's determined to prove his worth to Eli and the other heads of the Reign of Terror by making sure not a hair is harmed on her head, Oz is determined to prove to her that she is wrong about the bikers and their community.

I really like the YA books I've read in Katie McGarry's Pushing the Limits series, so when I heard that she had a new series out, and was able to request the book on NetGalley, I jumped at the chance. As with her other books, the chapters alternate between the heroine and hero, who usually start out from very different places, and gradually gain knowledge and understanding of the other. The setup for the book takes place over more or less twenty-four dramatic hours, when Emily and her parents go back to her mother's hometown in Kentucky to attend a funeral. Emily is persuaded to stay on with Eli and get to know more of his family, both biological and chosen. Due to her mother's stories about her time there, Emily is anxious and reluctant to stay, but also curious about Eli. When her beloved adopted father assures her that he doesn't feel threatened by her curiosity about her biological father's extended family, she's reluctantly convinced that staying in Kentucky is ok.

Oz lives and breathes for the biker club all the men of his acquaintance are a member of. Despite his parents' wishes that he go to college and use his brains to get a good degree, all he wants is to become a full member of the club, working for the security firm they own. He likes coaching little league teams and working with kids, but it's the club that is his only focus. He's asked to help guard Emily during her first twenty-four hours, and when he briefly nods off on duty, she and her parents are nearly attacked by their rivals, and Oz' chance at making prospect suddenly look very weak. So when Emily is persuaded to stay, and Eli gives Oz a second chance to prove his worth, Oz swears he'll never leave her side.

There are clearly secrets about Eli and Emily's mother's shared past that neither Oz and Emily know enough about, but members of Eli's family really want Emily to dig into her roots. While their relationship begins as deeply  antagonistic, the more time they spend together, the closer they grow. In the series description for Thunder Road, of which this book is the first, it claims it was pitched as West Side Story meets Sons of Anarchy, which seems pretty apt. Emily and Oz come from different worlds, but the more time Emily spends in Kentucky, the more she discovers that their heritage is very much the same, she's just been denied hers.

I liked the book, but it didn't captivate me like the best of McGarry's earlier books. I will be looking out for the next book in the series, and there are a number of troubled teens introduced over the course of the story that the reader will no doubt see find their own happy endings in future books.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 143. "Crash Into You" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 489 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Disclaimer! Harlequin Teen granted me an ARC of this through NetGalley in return for a fair review.

This is the third in the series of books (both excellent) about troubled teens who become attracted to their seemingly complete opposite. Previous books' characters appear or are mentioned, but the book works fine on its own too. If you are interested in starting at the beginning, though, start with Pushing the Limits.

Isaiah Walker should be living in foster care, but is secretly living with his best friend Noah (the hero of Pushing the Limits, who's the only person he really feels close to. However, rent money is hard to come by and if they can't find enough cash, Noah will have to move into subsidised college housing, while Isaiah has to go back to the indifferent foster parents he was so relieved to escape. He agrees to drive a car in an illegal street race to get extra money, and that's where he first meets Rachel.

Rachel Young has the perfect life, on paper. She's from a wealthy family, goes to the most prestigious private school in the state, has several protective older brothers and anything she could ever ask for. Except she suffers from terrible anxiety attacks, which she keeps repressing and keeping secret, because her family mustn't know that she's sick. Her parents' oldest daughter died of cancer when she was twelve, and Rachel, her twin and their slightly older brother have known all their lives that they were basically only born because their mother wanted another girl. That means that it's Rachel's job to make sure their mother is happy, even if it means pretending that she's a frilly girly girl who loves shopping and dresses and spa treatments, when what she really wants to do is work on her Mustang and race it as fast as she can down back roads. Even if making her mother happy means speaking at cancer fundraisers about the sister she never even met, despite the fact that public speaking makes her so anxious she vomits and nearly faints. When she finally escapes and hears about a street race, she's excited, only to turn terrified when the police arrive.

Isaiah looks tough and has a number of visible tattoos and piercings, yet Rachel feels a strange calm around him, and he helps her away from the police. At school, Rachel is known as the sickly, anxious girl with brothers who would pummel any boy who came near her, so she even if she managed to drum up the courage to speak to a boy, she probably wouldn't get the chance. At social events, her brothers' friends will occasionally pity-dance with her, but she's never had a chance to be alone with a boy, let alone one as different from her as Isaiah.

Isaiah knows that someone as clean and innocent and wealthy as Rachel has no business being involved in illegal street racing, and certainly shouldn't ever come near someone like him. When Eric, the thug who runs the races is robbed by the two college guys who tipped Rachel off about the race, Isaiah tries to stay far away from her, to protect her from Eric's attentions. But Eric finds her anyway, and both their lives are in danger if they can't find five thousand dollars to pay him. Isaiah and Rachel need to work together to get the money, and their job is made more difficult as Eric would much rather they both stay in his debt, giving him power over both of them.

While Isaiah and Rachel seemingly come from different worlds, they also have a lot in common. Isaiah feels abandoned by his mother, after discovering she was released from jail over a year before she tried to get back in contact with him. He's lying to his school and foster care worker about where he's actually living, and working so hard to get a good education and secure a job which will give him a chance to escape the misery of his current situation.

Rachel can never truly be herself and desperately hides her panic attacks, to the point where they become a risk to her health, just so her parents and brothers don't have to worry about another sick, weak and helpless sister. She's Colleen's replacement, and can't be honest about her interest in cars and mechanics and racing. She has an agreement with her twin that she covers for him, and he covers for her, which is the only way she can escape and drive aimlessly late into the night. She certainly can't tell her family that Eric is threatening to hurt her and Isaiah in all sorts of creative ways if he doesn't get his money, even if it was her brother's friends who really got her in trouble in the first place.

The characters in McGarry's books are always seeming opposites, who while not falling in love at first glance, certainly feel a strong draw to the other almost instantly, and who because of deep emotional issues have trouble acting on their real feelings. Isaiah feels lost, alone and distrusts pretty much all authority figures, especially those in the foster care system. He had two people he could rely on in thick and thin, and had his heart broken when one of these, Beth, the abused niece of his foster parents, moved in with her much more reliable uncle and found love with a baseball player at her new school (see Dare You To). Most of the people who surround him are as damaged and emotionally scarred as he is, or into some pretty destructive and quite possibly even illegal. It also doesn't take him long to realise that while Rachel may live in a big house, with parents and overprotective brothers, she is terrified of them finding out about her extra-curricular activities and that she's making herself ill trying to keep up her perfect facade. He also discovers, that while she may see herself as weak, she constantly rejects his protective instincts and insists on fighting her own battles.

Written as McGarry's other books, in chapters where the POV alternates between Isaiah and Rachel, the narrative device lets us get to know both characters really well, and invest more strongly in their relationship and emotions. While the characters tend to fall for each other quickly, there are always some pretty substantial challenges in the way of the couples' happy endings, and in this book, it's the fact that Isaiah is a formerly drug using, tattooed and pierced mechanic with an ex-jailbird mother, who's had his faith in pretty much everyone taken away by the crappiness of the world, while Rachel has an overprotective family who either doesn't understand her or won't let her be who she really wants to be and has grown up never being able to surpass the perfection of her long dead sister. Her family would never accept Isaiah, even if he makes her feel safer and more special than anyone else in her life, and they would certainly not react well to hearing that she was being blackmailed by a violent thug with organised crime connections because she snuck out and illegally street raced.

The characters have to work to overcome their difficulties, and one of the reasons that I like McGarry's books so much is that you don't actually have to suspend your disbelief all that much. For all the neglectful, violent or just plain misguided adults out there who screw up their children emotionally, there are also foster care workers, teachers, guidance councilors, therapists and others who want to help and can be trusted, if the damaged kids will just extend some trust. It's clear that there are several more books coming, and I'm hopeful that while the next book is about Rachel's older brother West, I will get to see Isaiah's prickly friend Abby find her soul mate in one of the future books, because she really seems to need to find someone good to take care of her.

#CBR5 Book 60. "Dare You To" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 479 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Dare You To is the sequel to Pushing the Limits, which I reviewed last year, but works fine on its own, and may even be better if you don't have any preconceived impressions of Beth from that book.

To say that Elizabeth "Beth" Risk has a sucky home life, would be an understatement. Beth's mum is an alcoholic and recreational drug user, with an abusive boyfriend. Yet Beth feels responsible for her father leaving them, years ago, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her mother out of jail, even if it means taking a beating now and again. Thanks to the help of her two best friends, Noah and Isaiah, she manages to stay mostly safe. Neither of the two boys think she should be protecting her mother the way she does. When Beth's mum smashes up her boyfriend's car, and Beth takes the blame for it, getting arrested so her mother doesn't violate her parole, the two foster care boys are relieved when Beth's uncle, Scott, arrives to bail her out of jail, and demands that she stay with him until she turns eighteen, even if it means they won't get to see her much anymore.

Scott is her father's younger brother, who knows exactly what sort of a dead beat Beth's father was. He left to become a baseball pro while Beth was still a little girl, and has just moved back into town with his wife. Unless Beth agrees to stay with him until she turns eighteen, and follow his rules, he'll make sure the police know all about Beth's mother and the things he found in her flat when he came looking for Beth. Defeated, Beth agrees, even though Scott's new wife is less than thrilled to have what she considers a severely messed up juvenile delinquent staying under her roof.

Ryan Stone is the local golden boy, whose baseball skills are likely to get him a career in the big leagues. Of course, most of the town don't know about the tensions he's experiencing at home, with his father shunning his older brother after he came out as gay, or that baseball may not be the only thing Ryan wants to focus on. His English teacher is pushing him to pursue his writing, and has even entered him into a big contest, but his father wants nothing to distract him from baseball games and showing off for talent scouts. He keeps his adrenaline up with constant dares, the hardest one in a while getting the phone number of a stand offish skater girl at Taco Bell. Imagine Ryan's surprise when the skater girl turns out to be the new girl in his school, and the niece of one of his baseball idols, Scott Risk? Of course, Beth still won't give him the time of day, and his friends up the dare from getting her phone number to getting her to agree to a date - but Ryan isn't worried. He never plays to lose, and he certainly intends to win this challenge.

Anyone who has read Pushing the Limits could be forgiven for thinking that Beth and Isaiah were clearly meant to end up together. McGarry even admits that when she was writing the first book, she fully intended them to become a couple. But things change, and never having been entirely convinced by their chemistry when they were supporting characters in Noah's book, I'm glad that McGarry changed her mind and developed new love interests for Beth and Isaiah (there's a sneak preview of Isaiah's book Crash Into You at the end of the book). While Isaiah is sweet, he never challenges or questions Beth, and he would certainly never push her out of her comfort zone.

Ryan is great. He's clearly so much more than your standard high school jock from the moment we meet him. While on the surface he has everything - looks, athletic skills, popularity, money - it's very obvious that he's desperately lonely after his beloved older brother left. He's clearly not really shared the true extent to his tense and uncomfortable home life after his father's autocratic decision to shun his eldest son with his closest friends. As well as being a star baseball player, he's apparently a great writer. He's strangely drawn to Beth from the first time they meet, and he's certainly not used to being outright rejected. At first, getting close to Beth is all about winning the dare, but the more time he spends with her, the more he realises that she's not actually what his first impressions, and the rumours about her, suggest.

Beth is fiercely loyal, even when that loyalty is undeserved and wholly misplaced. Her mother is an alcoholic and an addict, and Beth is the one who tries to make sure the bills are paid and they actually have food in the house. She feels that she cannot abandon her mother, as it's her fault that her father left them, even though he was a dead beat drug dealer, who would should clearly never have been allowed near women or kids. It's clear that Beth has taken beatings from her mother's abusive boyfriend more than once, just to deflect attention away from her mother. Noah and Isaiah try to keep her away from her home as much as possible, but they're foster kids, and don't exactly have the best resources. When her uncle Scott shows up, ready to swoop to the rescue after nearly a decade away, Beth just feels betrayed and she certainly doesn't want to give up her clothes and her friends and become someone she's not just because Scott has finally decided he can take care of her again.

Like in McGarry's last book, the chapters alternate between the protagonists' point of view, so you get to know both characters and their thoughts and emotions really well. It's a great way of making the reader sympathetic to the characters, and allows her to explore a situation from several angles. While I really liked McGarry's first book in the series, I enjoyed this one even more, possibly because while both Ryan and Beth's home lives were unpleasant and unenviable, they weren't as messed up as Echo's buried secrets. I'm very much looking forward to Isaiah's book, out in November, and will happily pay for it if I'm not lucky enough to get a NetGalley ARC the third time around.

This book was an ARC from Harlequin Australia, given to me through NetGalley. The book is on sale in hardcover and e-book, worldwide, now.

CBR4 Book 101: "Pushing the Limits" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: November 20th, 2012
Date finished: November 21th, 2012

Echo (named for a Greek nymph) Emerson used to be one of the popular girls in school, dating one of the stars of the basketball team. But one night two years ago, her life changed drastically, leaving her nearly dead in the hospital with horrific scars all down her arms and she doesn't even remember what happened, only that it has something to do with her mother, who is now kept away by a restraining order. She hates going to therapy, she hates that her father is having a baby with her step-mum (who used to be her babysitter). She desperately misses her older brother, who died on a mission in Afghanistan two years ago, and now her father is threatening to sell the car he wanted to restore. She needs to get a job, so she can make enough money to complete her brother's project, she wants to discover what happened to her, and she wants everything to return to normal.

Noah Hutchins had a stable and loving family, until his life changed drastically when his parents died in a fire. In school, he's known as a girl using loner, a stoner kid with no prospects. Only his closest friends know that he's been in and out of a series of shitty foster homes, and desperately wants to be reunited with his two younger brothers, who he barely ever sees, because he was judged emotionally unstable when he punched his abusive first foster father. If he's to have any hope of gaining custody over his little brothers when he turns 18, he needs to improve his grade point average drastically, get a good job, a place to live and  hopefully discredit the foster parents now raising his brothers. He would give anything for his life to go back to some kind of normal.

The new school therapist, Mrs. Collins, decides to give Echo a job tutoring Noah. She promises Noah increased visitation with his brothers if he promises to shape up, and despite his deep mistrust of social workers and authority figures, he has no choice but to agree to his plan. Unfortunately, because of some misguided verbal exchanges with Echo, the tutoring job might not be something she'll feel comfortable sticking with. Both teenagers are deeply vulnerable and very wounded, extremely mistrustful of the adults around them after facing bitter disappointment again and again. On the surface, they have nothing in common, but once they start talking, they're drawn to each other like moths to a flame.

The book is written in alternating points of view, so the reader gets to follow both Echo and Noah closely. While the book blurb made me expect a fairly run of the mill high school romance, where now outcast good girl loses her heart to the resident bad boy, the book proved to be a lot more than that, and a lot better than the back cover makes it sound. Katie McGarry writes very believable teenagers, and both protagonists have gone through hell. It's completely understandable that they feel angry, and helpless and desperate, and long for a return to the pleasant, normal lives they used to have.

The full back stories for both characters are gradually revealed, and it keeps the suspense up. Noah and Echo team up to try to get access to their files in Mrs. Collins' office. Echo can barely sleep and is plagued with horrific nightmares every time she does sleep. She wants to know the full story behind her "incident" without having to gradually remember it through therapy, convinced that if she just knows the whole truth, she'll find peace. Noah wants the name and address of his brothers' foster parents, convinced that they're being mistreated, and determined to prove it, so he can win custody over them as soon as he comes of age. It's obvious to the reader that these are dreadful plans, but you still go along for the ride, hoping that the characters find closure and some sense of relief towards the end.

I received an ARC of this from Mira Ink through NetGalley, and am sorry that I didn't read it sooner. Not at all the cliched teen romance I thought it at first, it's a beautiful story of two damaged people finding each other, and helping each other through a difficult time. It's currently a finalist in Young Adult Fiction in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2012, and available in hardcover or e-book.