Review: CRASH INTO YOU by @KatieMcGarry. #NewAdult #YA #AmReading

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.

Crash Into You is the third book in Katie McGarry’s Harlequin Teen series (that inexplicable has no series title), and I think it is her best yet. Rachel is a complex character with is host of issues. her family is one of the most messed up I’ve read, yet they still come across as real. (I can totally see this happening in a family who loses a child to an early death.) Rachel was born to be a replacement child. When her older sister died of Leukemia at thirteen, their parents went on having babies until they produced another girl. As her sister’s replacement, Rachel is expected to take on the interests and personality of the dead sister she never met. The therapy bills that will be needed to straighten these people out will rival the GDP of a small country.

Isaiah is another story. Honestly, I didn’t care for him all that much in Dare You To. His “best friend” Beth jacked him around something fierce and he let her. That kind of made me want to smack him. But Isaiah completely turned my opinion of him around in this book. He is also a complex character  who has had to grow up way too fast and still harbors a bit of that damaged child inside him.  Rachel calls him bossy, and he calls himself protecting, but unlike so many other male characters in New Adult books, he doesn’t come across as a controlling jerk. That is a big thing for me as you all may remember from my previous blog post on the how men are portrayed in New Adult books - http://ow.ly/pQu7R. Isaiah is not an asshole, although the author very easily could have made him be if she hadn’t been careful. For that, I am grateful.

The conflict in the story revolves around Rachel having an unfortunate run-in with the King Pin of illegal street racing and unwittingly finds herself indebted to him. Isaiah, being the protector sort, decides to help Rachel out of the mess. The two have to pull together to find a way to earn money to buy the bad guy off. It would have been easy for a “street thug” like Isaiah to earn the money illegally, but he has a strong moral code, and he wants to do it in the right way. I admire that.

One of my favorite supporting characters in the book was Abby, the drug dealer with a heart of gold. It is impossible not to like her. I’m sensing McGarry will give Abby her own book at some point, and I’d love to read it! (Hopefully not with Ethan as the love interest though. I’m mad at him.)

My only complaint about the book is that I wanted more punishment on Rachel’s family for the years of abuse they put her through. Not just her parents, but also her brothers, treated her like shit. I hated them all by the end.

Overall, I give Crash Into You...

Plot - 5 bookmarks

Character development - 4 1/2 bookmarks (I would have liked to see Rachel’s family evolve more in the end.)

Love story - 5 bookmarks

Dream cast (otherwise known as who I pictured while reading) - Jessica Amlee (Rachel), Liam Hemsworth (Isaiah), Juno Temple (Abby)

** This title releases on 

November 26, 2013. **