Review: Dare You To by Katie McGarry

Title: Dare You To (Pushing the Limits #2)
Author: Katie Mcgarry
Published: 1 June 2013
Source: HarlequinTEEN Australia
Reviewed: Sapphireddragon
SapphiredDragon Rating: *****

Dare You To (Pushing the Limits #2) by Katie McGarry

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If anyone knew the truth about Beth Risk's home life, they'd send her mother to jail and seventeen-year-old Beth who knows where. So she protects her mom at all costs. Until the day her uncle swoops in and forces Beth to choose between her mom's freedom and her own happiness. That's how Beth finds herself living with an aunt who doesn't want her and going to a school that doesn't understand her. At all. Except for the one guy who shouldn't get her, but does....

Ryan Stone is the town golden boy, a popular baseball star jock-with secrets he can't tell anyone. Not even the friends he shares everything with, including the constant dares to do crazy things. The craziest? Asking out the Skater girl who couldn't be less interested in him.

But what begins as a dare becomes an intense attraction neither Ryan nor Beth expected. Suddenly, the boy with the flawless image risks his dreams-and his life-for the girl he loves, and the girl who won't let anyone get too close is daring herself to want it all....

Review: 

There are some novels that you know you are going to love after reading just the first page or two.  Dare You To is one of those novels, and not just because the first novel of this series, Pushing The Limits  by author, Katie McGarry, was one of my favourite reads of 2012.  The voice of this novel captures you from the moment you read the first page of the first chapter.

What I love about Katie McGarry's novels is that she does not sugar coat her stories or her characters. Her story  lines are gritty and her characters real and there are no happy endings for happy endings sake.  The ending of this novel ( and I am not going to tell you what sort of an ending it is, happy or otherwise) stay true to her characters and storyline.  There are terrible situations and hard choices, and deliriously happy moments and devastating ones and they all go together to make this awesome novel.  Some of the outcomes you can see coming, some not so much but it is the journey that is in between is what keeps you reading on, gripped to the story.

However it is not just the storyline that is so good about this novel, it is the characters as well. Beth, we first met in Pushing the Limits and Ryan is a brand new character but right from the beginning I think I loved them both.  What Ms McGarry excels at is making us feel both for and with the characters.  Her writing of them evokes many of the emotions that these characters feel.  You can feel the goodness and strength in Ryan and the rage and sadness in beth when we first meet her in this novel and then we get to experience as well as witness the journey both of these characters go on.

At the end of the day, this is a novels is something you experience as well as read.  You are in the story from beginning  to end regardless of whether you have the book in front of you or not. Being the mother of a fourteen month old, I try not to stay up to late most nights but my attempt at putting down this book overnight failed miserably as I lay in bed thinking about the characters and the story and ended up getting up and reading another 100 pages before attempting to sleep again and I couldn't wait for my daughter's afternoon nap the following day to finish the story.

If you loved Pushing The Limits, then you will absolutely love Dare You To.  Actually I would recommend Dare You To to pretty much everyone.

I give this novel 5 stars!!

Sapphired Dragon xx