Review: Dare You To by Katie McGarry

I got the ARC of this novel from the publisher via Netgalley free of charge – thank you very much! Of course that fact didn’t influence my review in any way.

Synopsis:

Beth Risk is…a risky girl. Small wonder – she lives with a mother addicted to drugs who constantly chooses bad guys and never hesitates to bring them home. The acquaintance with Beth means only one thing: shame and troubles. The girl herself seems to follow the steps of her only parent - she has already slept with different guys who dumped her in no time. She drinks  and smokes pot. What’s more, Beth feels responsible for her mom and sometimes intervenes when a particularly nasty boyfriend  hurts her. She seems unaware that it should be completely the other way round – mothers are here to protect their kids. Dysfunctional doesn’t even starts to cover their relationship.

One night Ryan Stone tries to pick Beth up in a Taco Bell joint. It was a dare between him and his buddies – chat that strange chick up, although she has ‘mean’ written all over her face, and make her give you her name and phone number. Ryan loses and he hates losing so he decides to try and try again – especially when Beth moves to his home town and happens to be related to one of local baseball heroes, Scott Risk.

Ryan is a high school baseball star – an excellent player, a boy from a good family every father would like to greet as his daughter’s boyfriend. When he falls for Beth, though, he meets a wall of distrust and worry. Will he be able to overcome it? Will Beth allow him to do so?

What I liked:

I am very happy to inform you that, in my humble opinion the second part was better than Pushing the Limits. Firstly I liked its heroine, Beth, far more than Echo - she was more edgy, more conflicted and dark. Secondly I liked the pacing – especially the fact that the romance between Beth and Ryan developed slowly and we were given the opportunity to know them before they actually hooked up.

I also liked how the feelings between Beth and Ryan influenced their lives – especially Ryan’s family life, not so perfect as it seemed at the very beginning.

What I didn’t like:

Firstly I might repeat my main grievance from the previous book: the chapters narrated by Ryan sometimes read as narrated by a girl. Not by Beth, fortunately, but by a girl nevertheless. They were better than Noah’s chapters from the previous part but still not persuasive enough.

The author kept Beth’s silent admirer and companion, Isaiah, from the first book and created something almost like a love triangle. Keeping him was fine, love triangle – not so much. That ‘almost’ word saved the novel but honestly, how many times a girl must say ‘I love you like a FRIEND’ so the boy gets the message? Especially that from the sneak peek included at the end of the ARC I know Isaiah is going to have a book on his own and he is going to fall in love with a different girl. How it is supposed to work? No idea.

Some fragments of the novel felt a bit overlong – I admit I did skim over such scenes as girls’ bonding and adjusting to new school or arguing with friends over some trust issues or baseball-speak of Ryan.

I mentioned earlier that I liked Beth…yes I did, most of the time. Still there were moments when she felt too clean and almost too innocent for such an experienced character.

Final verdict:

A nice YA romance (sic!) which I requested on a whim and started reading without expecting anything good at all. It proved to be quite decently written, with interesting characterization and characters which made sense. I hope the third part will be even better although I am not a big Isaiah fan.

Review: Pusing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Thank you, my fair Rameau, for lending me this one! You rock!

Book info:
Form: pdf e-book
Genre: YA romance (or New Adult but really I am yet to spot the difference)
Target audience: older YA.

Synopsis:

The last year of high school, somewhere in America. A girl meets a boy. She is called Echo, he is called Noah. Both have serious family issues but of different kind. He falls for her because she smells like cinnamon rolls. She falls for him because he is a very handsome, bad-boy stoner with...er... issues.  And a six-pack stomach. The crazy attraction between them refuses to go away although their friends are not impressed. Will they stay together? SPOILER: You bet

My impressions:

I rarely read YA novels nowadays. Why? The moment I start them the plot seems so strangely familiar, too familiar to be honest - after a page or two I am pretty sure I've read it before. Like one hundred times before. It holds no appeal as there are no real surprises or twists I wouldn't have predicted. Not nice or even downright boring. Pushing the Limits wasn't an exception to the rule.

Echo, is a high school student who went from a popular girl with a jock boyfriend to a gossiped-about outsider with "freaky" scars on her arms during one month. Noah is a boy who has lost his parents in a fire and cannot visit his younger brothers so he is revolting against the school rules and any rules at all. Both are attracted to each other because they are in fact very similar in their rejection of ugly reality. You don't have to be a genius to assume they will be an item at one point "against all odds" - especially that she is a very attractive girl and he is a very handsome young man. The main problem is not "what happen" but "how" and "when".

And here I wasn't impressed - the execution simply didn't work for me. It felt too overwrought, too obvious, too overwhelmingly angsty and dramatic to make me really engaged with the story. Almost spurious. While I was able to feel for both Echo and Noah occasionally, I didn't really connect with them.

The book is narrated by both of the main characters. First annoying feature: Noah’s and Echo’s voices were quite similar, very surprisingly so. The only thing really differentiating them: Noah’s dialogue was peppered with profanities. Well, perhaps it's just me but personally I found Noah's chapters also the silliest of all. He thought like a girl - I mean no teenage boy would speak/think like that. His repeated use of expressions like “siren”, "angel", “nymph” and “seductress” produced more snort-laughs than swoons from me and the constant reminder of how Echo smelled (cinnamon rolls) made me only annoyingly hungry (where's the nearest bakery, pronto?) but honestly, do tell me, do you know any REAL GIRL who smells like that without using any kind of perfume?

There are also many kinds of cliche secondary characters which have been featured in EVERY SINGLE ONE high school YA novel I've read so far: a douche bag hunky boyfriend (Luke), a false female friend who is also a bit of a meanie (Grace), a bunch of evil gossipers, Noah's 'bad company' consisting of heavily tattooed, marijuana-smoking misfits who still have a single savin g grace or two...I wasn't able to find even one inch of originality here.

Final verdict:

A decent story; still an instantly forgettable one. It was short and relatively readable but also nothing that can persuade me to read YA novels more often.