Review: Crash into You

Crash into You, by Katie McGarry. The GoodReads summary:

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 feel like at this point I know what to expect from Katie McGarry’s books: There will be two teens in messed-up situations who fall in love despite all the things working against them. Family drama will abound. The plot will veer towards the overly dramatic. The boy will be tough on the outside but more emotionally aware than any boy I’ve met in real life. Love will, of course, prevail. And you know what? I’m okay with these books being formulaic, because sometimes you just need a teen romance that you know will hit the spot without asking too much of you.

“Crash into You” meets all the criteria above. In this book, Rachel is struggling with panic attacks and a family who refuses see her for who she really is. Isaiah is dealing with being a foster kid and with his mom coming back in his life. And they both are trying to find a way to get a few thousand dollars that this shady guy thinks they owe him—which means racing to win money. So as you can guess, dramatic situations happen all over the place in this book. I pretty much spent the whole time cringing as one thing after another goes wrong for Rachel and Isaiah. They do not have it easy, that’s for sure.

Isaiah is hot, so that’s kinda all that matters to me on that front. Plus, as mentioned above, he’s got the whole tough on the outside sensitive on the inside thing going on. Rachel was an interesting character, I thought, because her whole life everyone has seen her as weak because of her panic attacks, but with Isaiah, she gets the chance to show her strength, so it was interesting to get to see those different aspects of her character.

The two things that bugged me bugged me for similar reasons. First, I feel like Rachel’s panic attacks, which take center stage for a lot of the book, all of a sudden drop completely off the radar a towards the end when something more dramatic happens. It’s like the author got distracted by this new turn of events and forgot to give any kind of resolution or wrap-up of the panic attack part of the story. The second thing was that I feel like the resolution with Eric (the shady guy they owe money) was really weak. Like, it felt way too easy considering how much it was built up to.

Overall, if you liked McGarry’s other two books, I’m sure you’ll like this one as well, since it follows the same formula. I was a little disappointed when I saw the next book will be about West instead of about Abby, but I’m sure I’ll be reading it all the same.

Rating : 3.5 / 5