Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols

Title: Going Too Far

Author: Jennifer Echols

Publisher: MTV Books

Release Date: March 17, 2009

Source: Purchased

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository / Indigo

HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO?

All Meg has ever wanted is to get away. Away from high school. Away from her backwater town. Away from her parents who seem determined to keep her imprisoned in their dead-end lives. But one crazy evening involving a dare and forbidden railroad tracks, she goes too far...and almost doesn’t make it back.

John made a choice to stay. To enforce the rules. To serve and protect. He has nothing but contempt for what he sees as childish rebellion, and he wants to teach Meg a lesson she won’t forget. But Meg pushes him to the limit by questioning everything he learned at the police academy. And when he pushes back, demanding to know why she won’t be tied down, they will drive each other to the edge--and over...

Like a lot of book I’ve been reading lately, I picked up Going Too Far because of all the great reviews I had seen online. I now see what all those reviews were going on about and I have to say I absolutely agree with them. It was a fantastic read that had me from start to finish. I absolutely could not put it down until I had read every last word. That’s just how good a book it was.

Meg wants nothing more than to get away from her small town and go to university. She already knows the night of her graduation she is leaving and most likely not coming back. The last thing she wants is to end up like her parents. And then one night she gets in trouble and meets Office John After. John just wants to stay in this small town and protect teenagers from what happened ten years before on the train bridge. Both have their secrets and will push each other to new extremes and who knows where it will take them.

I loved Meg as a character. You can really see that she grew through the course of the story. She starts out as someone who doesn’t really care about anything except getting away from home. She is the go-to bad girl even though her reputation may not always be accurate (it just may have something to do with her hair). She doesn’t plan anything because that would mean thinking too far into the future and that’s something she just can’t do. By the end of the book she is making plans and actually enjoying making plans and looking forward to the plans she made. Meg was also a really realistic character; despite not having gone through all the same things as her I could relate to her on so many occasions.

I don’t even know where to begin with John’s character. You think he’s one thing and then a few pages you realize you may have gotten it wrong. And when you think you finally have him figured out it turns out you were wrong once again. He is such a complex character and you don’t understand him completely until the very last page of the book. I’ll admit that may have had something to do with me not putting the book down. I was so obsessed with figuring him out that I would not stop reading until I was able to know who he truly was. It was really a great incentive to keep reading...at least for me.

The story is basically all about Meg and John’s relationship. Their relationship is such a complex one that you need the entire book to figure it all out. Just like with John’s character, I just had to keep reading so I could find out what happens between them. And like many things in this book, I didn’t find out until the very last page. Despite everything not unravelling until the very end of the book, the was never a time when the story dragged on. The book was relatively short and the story was fast paced which only served to make me read further.

It was my first time reading anything by Jennifer Echols and I can honestly that I will be picking up more of her books in the future. I truly enjoyed Going Too Far and would recommend it to anyone looking for something different. It wasn’t completely out there but it was definitely different from most of the books in the same genre.