Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Five/five stars!

Well. Pushing the Limits was very, very good. I was hesitant to buy it at first because I didn’t think that I would enjoy it, but my mum gave me money and 20 minutes in Dymocks so I brought it anyway. And oh my gosh, am I glad I did. This book was amazing. I just loved it. Katie McGarry dealt with family and friendship issues, bullying, love and trauma. Pushing the Limits had me feeling ALL THE THINGS. Seriously, I have no idea how my mum and friends dealt with me while I was reading this book – I was nuts.

Echo doesn’t know what happened to her the night she went from miss popular to freak. She doesn’t know how she got the ugly, scary scars on her arms, and she doesn’t fully understand why her father ordered a restraining order on her mother. As Echo bounces from one therapist to another, all she wants to know is why she got the freaking scars! Enter seriously hot, man-whore, drug abusing loser Noah. Pfft, no one thinks this will work well but… Somehow Echo and Noah end up working together to achieve different goals with the help of one another. They also end up forging a strong relationship. But what will really be the consequences of Echo working so hard to find out about “that night” and will she lose Noah?

This book had me an emotional mess. Echo and Noah were so perfect and I felt so sorry for them. They were both struggling with completely different things but they managed to work it out together.

Echo was a perfect character. I loved her. She wasn’t a stuck-up perfect bitch or a weird loser. She was just Echo. Sure, she used to be super popular before being labelled as the freak, but she still kept her sanity and some friends. She didn’t whine about the stupid things in life, she had real issues to deal with. Echo dealt with real, raw emotions that just ripped me apart.

After the death of his parents, Noah is bouncing from one foster house to another and from one girl to another. People assume he is a permanently stoned loser, but he is just trying to keep it together. He wants his brothers back, he wants his family back, he just wants his old life back. When he sees Echo, he thinks he’s just going to have a bit of fun, but it turns out she means so much more to him than he could possibly imagine. Together, Noah and Echo conquer life’s issues, family trouble and a friggin’ crazy therapist.

This book could quite possibly be the death of some really emotional people. Even I cried (not that that matters, I cry at everything, but still). Everything in this book was realistic; the characters, the themes, the dialogue. I loved this book so, so, so much and would recommend it to everybody (well, maybe over the age of 13). I will read anything and everything this author writes.