Review: Breaking the Rules by Katie McGarry

Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Publication Date: December 8, 2014

Rating: 4/5

A summer road trip changes everything in this unforgettable new tale from acclaimed author Katie McGarry

For new high school graduate Echo Emerson, a summer road trip out west with her boyfriend means getting away and forgetting what makes her so... different. It means seeing cool sights while selling her art at galleries along the way. And most of all, it means almost three months alone with Noah Hutchins, the hot, smart, soul-battered guy who’s never judged her. Echo and Noah share everything — except the one thing Echo’s just not ready for.

But when the source of Echo’s constant nightmares comes back into her life, she has to make some tough decisions about what she really wants — even as foster kid Noah’s search for his last remaining relatives forces them both to confront some serious truths about life, love, and themselves.

Now, with one week left before college orientation, jobs and real life, Echo must decide if Noah's more than the bad-boy fling everyone warned her he'd be. And the last leg of an amazing road trip will turn... seriously epic. (Goodreads)

 

This book picks up where Pushing the Limit ends and man oh man and I so glad that I stumbled across this book, I didn't even know existed. So we know from the first book that Noah and Echo were pretty messed up, they both had some serious emotional baggage, and they were using the summer trip as a new beginning. Echo was going to try to sell some of her paintings, and Noah was going to be by her side every step of the way. However, during the last week of the trip everything starts to fall apart. Noah finds out that apparently he has living family members, and Echo's mom shows up. There were some parts of the book where I was literally tugging at my hair. Noah has so little confidence in his self worth that he spend most of the book sabotaging their relationship and Echo... there was so much going on there I don't know where to start. We saw some of Echo's mom at the end of the first book, and Echo does have her memories back of the fatal night, but that doesn't mean that their relationship is anywhere near functional.

I loved the same thing about this book that I loved about the last one. Echo and Noah are real people (well you know, sort of). This book shows us, that just because book one ended, doesn't mean that their lives were perfect. There were still problems, they still had issues to work out with each other and within themselves. It sounds cheesy, but more more cheesy than thinking someone can lose their parents in a house fire, or being attacked and almost killed by your bipolar mother while your father's on a date with the babysitter. Noah and Echo were bound to still have a ton of problems after the last page of “Pushing the Limits” and I'm so glad that we were able to experience it.