Review Detail

I have yet to read a negative review for Pushing the Limits, and when I went to find one on Goodreads, I really had to dig. [Edit: I found one negative review.] As a reader and a book blogger, when a book gets this much massive hype, I get suspicious. So obviously I had to give Pushing the Limits a try.

Basically, Pushing the Limits is your typical teen romance novel, only for once the protagonists have real problems. That was a nice spin on things, and the fact that Echo and Noah had tough issues to deal with kept me from getting bored with the fluffiness.

As characters, I liked Echo and Noah. They were well-rounded, realistic people, and they had problems more important than a broken fingernail. McGarry’s cast of supporting characters was very nice as well—everyone was nuanced and no one was just black and white.

I also thought the plot itself was good. Most romances tend to follow a pattern, and while I can’t say that Pushing the Limits was completely out of the box, it didn’t go down the most obvious road.

Okay, now, the romance aspect is what everyone seems to be all excited about. For myself, I’ve read swoonier books. I think that if you take a “good girl with issues falls for bad boy who’s secretly sensitive” pairing, a lot of the excitement and freshness is lost. Yeah, there was A LOT of kissing in Pushing the Limits, but the way McGarry wrote those scenes didn’t make them special to me.

And that brings me to the one thing that kept me from raving about this book: McGarry’s prose. It was effective and clear, but for me it lacked something that would have made it spectacular. I was never fully hooked by the writing as I was with by story and characters.

While I don’t believe that Pushing the Limits quite lives up to the massive hype it’s been getting, I do think it’s a very good book, and well worth reading. McGarry’s more “serious” take on teen romance was refreshing, and the end result was a very emotional book with memorable and heartwarming characters.