Book review - Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols

Meg hates being closed in, confined, limited to her small town. She can’t wait to graduate and leave forever. John joined the police as soon as he could and plans to stick around forever, despite great grades and offers of scholarships from good universities. One night on patrol, he comes across Meg and a few friends up on a forbidden railway bridge. Their punishment – each will ride around for a week with one of the services who got called out because of their crime. Meg has to spend a week of night shifts with the model policeman. They push each other further and further, demanding answers from one another, why one is so determined to escape and the other so dedicated to staying. But they begin to go too far, questioning each other’s deepest secrets and fears.

After reading the sneak peak on Jennifer's website, I really wanted to read this. I started reading with high expectations for Going Too Far and it met them. The situation of a criminal driving around with a policeman is original, and creates an interesting relationship between them. As it turns out, they’re not so different. The chemistry between John and Meg was perfect – sweet but not too overdone. John’s ‘secret’ was fairly predictable, but I expected Meg’s to be something quite different. In retrospect, I preferred the actual plot – my prediction would have made the story too neat and unbelievable.


*SPOILER ALERT!!! - If you want to stay spoiler-free skip ahead to the black text again*

I kind of thought that Meg’s claustrophobia, fear of machinery noises, and knowing the medics so well was because she had been in a car crash. Which would have given John as much foot-in-mouth at the car crash as Meg felt at the bridge. But you can see that this would have been way too neat – both of them stumbling so exactly on each other’s problems. I’m glad it didn’t work out how I expected.

*SPOILER OVER*

My only problem was halfway through when Meg acted how I felt was very out-of-character, practically yelling her secret at John. The yelling wasn’t out of character – there’s some very exciting tension between them! – I just felt that the situation didn’t really connect enough with her problem enough for her to want to share it. This is just a minor issue though, and one I can overlook because the rest of the book was so good.
There was far more depth to the plot than I expected, and ditto for all of the characters. In just a few words, Jennifer managed to turn secondary characters into believable people, especially Brian and Tiffany, two of Meg’s fellow partners-in-crime in the bridge escapade where they were caught. It is a sweet love story as the pretty cover suggests, but there’s so much more to it than that. (I seem to say that quite often for books like this, but only ever when I think it's true!) Overall, a fun, thoughtful and exciting read.

Thankyou to Jenn for sending me a copy!