Review: Crash into You by Katie McGarry

Title: Crash into You (Pushing the Limits #3)
Author: Katie McGarry
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Release date: November 26th 2013
Source: Netgalley
Format: egalley

Rating: 4/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

You can read my review of Pushing the Limits - here & Dare You To - here

From acclaimed author Katie McGarry comes an explosive new tale of a good girl with a reckless streak, a street-smart guy with nothing to lose, and a romance forged in the fast lane

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.

I was desperately waiting to read Crash into You as soon as I finished reading Dare You To, because after what happened to Isaiah on the previous book I was ready to read his story. And just like I get to know Beth on Dare You To and saw her with different eyes, the same happened to me with Isaiah because I had a preconceived idea of ​​him because of the way he is introduced on Pushing the Limits and Dare You To, so this book showed me a different Isaiah.

On Crash into You we see Isaiah as a bad boy, with tattoos, he gives a vibe of been an aggressive guy, but all of it is a defense mechanism for the dangerous world in which he lives, because that way nobody bothers him and that's the way he likes it; since he was six years old he had been in several foster homes. He´s seventeen years old, he´s a senior at high school, in the evenings works in an auto shop and his passion are fast cars. He meets Rachel on a clandestine street race; Rachel is a rich girl, whose passion are also fast cars and likes to talk about cars and fix cars or at least she knows the basics because more than once we she her changing the motor oil to her brother´s cars. Rachel has four older brothers that expect/wish her to never have a boyfriend, but they are useless because they spend all their time giving her "guilt trips" and depending on her to keep their mother happy.

I must say that there were times when I did not liked Rachel, she´s a super shy, introverted girl that suffers of severe panic attacks whenever she speaks in public and this isn´t bad because I was also too shy on my teens but what is bad is that she lets her entire family literally use her to keep her mom happy, because apparently she suffers from severe depression and the only thing that keeps her happy is that Rachel gives speeches at social events, which doesn´t help with her panic attacks, which she some how keeps a secret from most of her family and some of her brothers help her to hide it. So Rachel has to pretend with her ​​parents and siblings and be a super girly girl, when in fact her passion are sport cars and driving fast.

The downside for me was that I already had the idea that it would be about clandestine street races, Fast and Furious style (the first film) and there was only one race like that, there is where Isaiah and Rachel meet, but after that there were some races more like Drag Racing.

The good thing was that some of the previous characters made cameos in this book such as Noah and Echo from the first book, and Beth, Ryan and Logan from the second book; and is the latter that have a more important role in this book, I really liked Logan and I hope that in the future he gets his own book.

Overall, Crash into You is not as good as Pushing the Limits and Dare You To, but I liked the story of Isaiah which is what I liked most of this book, the romance fell into the classic cliche of bad-boy and poor meets good-girl and rich and I also feel that there was some lacking on the chemistry between Isaiah and Rachel, because most of the time Rachel lets her insecurities rule her life. But as a big fan of the series, I did enjoy it and can´t wait to read the next book.

I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.