Review: Crash Into You by Katie McGarry

Grade: 4.5 Butterflies
Series: Pushing the Limits #3
Author: Katie McGarry
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Pages: Hardcover, 474 pages

Goodreads Summary

The girl with straight As, designer clothes and the perfect life—that's who people expect Rachel Young to be. So the private-school junior keeps secrets from her wealthy parents and overbearing brothers...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 when the foster kid with the tattoos and intense gray eyes comes to her rescue, she can't get him out of her mind. 

Isaiah has secrets, too. About where he lives, and how he really feels about Rachel. The last thing he needs is to get tangled up with a rich girl who wants to slum it on the south side for kicks-no matter how angelic she might look. 

But when their shared love of street racing puts both their lives in jeopardy, they have six weeks to come up with a way out. Six weeks to discover just how far they'll go to save each other.

So I, like most other readers, really enjoy this series. If you don't know, I have a somewhat rocky relationship with contemporaries. I either really dislike them or really love them. This author writes contemporaries that I fall in love with!! This one, in my mind, was the best one in the series! I loved it and the romance was the best!!! While I really liked the first two, they were either missing the book spark or they just had problems I couldn't look past. However, this one was great!! It still had some problems, but the were minor enough that they didn't effect the final rating.

This plot was amazing! It was fast paced, I flew through these pages, but it wasn't to fast that it confused you. It had the perfect balance between keeping the reader hooked and giving enough time for the romance. And while at first I thought the plot was a little cliche (the good girl going to the bad part of town and getting mixed up with the wrong people, then falling for the one of those 'wrong people') it didn't feel cliche. The author wrote it in such a way that it felt new and exciting.

Even though the plot really hooked me and left me wanting more, even though it was amazing, I did have on slight problem. Although, this problem might have to do more with the character then the plot. Throughout this one book Rachel never asked her family for help. I understand that her family is the most dysfunctional fictional family I have ever read and that she didn't want to make her mom unhappy, but come on! There is a guy who would kill you and Isaiah and you don't want to even consider going to your family for help even to save your life and Isaiah's??  Really?!?!!? However, this wasn't a really big problem, this was just my personal annoyance at Rachel.

That goes to the one and only real kind of big problem I had with this book. That is Rachel. First off I want to say that all other characters were amazing. Isaiah had so much depth and so many different parts of his personality was shown, which made him feel all the more human. The same goes for the side characters, even if I didn't like the character they still had a whole lot of depth. And that is exactly what happened with Rachel. I really didn't like this girl for most of this book. It's not that I hated her, but she got on my nerves a little bit. She just wouldn't stand up for herself, at all!! The first half of this book she refused to stand up to her family when they were being unfair hypocrites! I know it takes a lot to get you to a point where you snap and are able to stand up to your family, but Rachel should have reached that point a year before this book started.

 The only reason why this was such a minor problem was because I know this author. I know she was just trying to set up for a good character arc and great character development, which is what we got from Rachel. She grew so much in this book and by the end she was able to stand up for herself and what she wanted. She also learned to speak her mind to her family, which was wonderful to see.

The romance in this book was just simply amazing! Which in itself is amazing, considering this book had insta-love in it. After just a few hours together they felt an undeniable attraction to one another. However, the author still made me love this romance. I think that's because, not only how good Isaiah and Rachel were together but how it wasn't that they loved each other after those few hours. They liked each other sure, but they didn't love each other. I think what also saved this romance was how it had problems. Like every other relationship out there, Rachel and Isaiah had problems and bumps in the road. They had to find a balance with their relationship and they had to compromise with one another, which was great to read because that is how it is in real life!! It was that aspect of their relationship that really made me love it!! That and the fact how Rachel and Isaiah made each other better. They weren't like Noah and Echo who gave each other strength to be themselves, or Beth and Ryan who made each other shine. Rachel and Isaiah made each other better. He help her grow as a person and get over some of her faults and made her a better person and Vice Verse. Which was just amazing to read. I am actually obsessed with this book just because of their relationship and how realistic and good it was.

One last thing I would like to talk about is Rachel's family. I like how Katie McGarry really took a new direction with this family. Usually in books the dysfunctional families are dysfunctional because of drinking, neglect, abuse, or just awfulness from the parents. I really liked how the author made Rachel's family different. It's not that they didn't have their hearts in the right place, they just didn't think about what they were doing. Rachel's family could have won an award for how dysfunctional it was. Everyone was trying to protect the Mom and no one else. Which left Rachel all alone because she was the one that would make their Mom happy, so she had to sacrifice her happiness for her mom's. Which was so unfair! Like I said earlier even if I didn't like some characters they still had a lot of depth to them which applies mostly for this family. For most of this book I hated Rachel's family, which I think was the point. I hated how hypocritical her bothers were, how her mother always compared her to Colleen, and how blinded her father, how they never considered the fact that the Mom could hold her own. She didn't need protecting. However, it was great to see how this family grew in this book. I happened mostly towards the end of the book, but it was still their and it was great to see her family trying to be a good, functional family.

Overall I thought this was an amazing book!! With the realistic and amazing romance, the growth of the characters not to mention their depth, and how captivating the plot was, this is easily my favorite of the series. It was just so good!!

This book got.....

4.5 Butterflies

Beautiful, this is a great book. 

Happy reading