Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols - Book Review

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 way 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 soon 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....

This book is bad.  No getting around it, it was the worst read of the year for me, and one of my worst reading experiences ever.  I finished this novel weeks ago, but I was just too infuriated by it to attempt writing a review.  I think I’ve cooled off enough since then to not become a puddle of gooey rage and expletives, so here goes.

First off, let me address the rating; 4.02 average, as of the time I'm writing this review.  I'll be honest, it's what reeled me in.  And caught me like a fish on a hook, in for the same amount of torture.  Now I'll admit to being on the outside of a lot of book hype; I was one of the seven people in the entire world who didn't like Divergent.  But I would read a dozen Divergents, two City Of Bones, and top it off with an entire reread of the Twilight saga over subjecting myself to Going Too Far again.

Sound harsh?  Well, it is.  But this is a novel that prompted me to make a whole new goodreads shelf to showcase it's absolute crappiness.

Now, for the examples; From page one, it becomes evident that the writing is sub-par.  Sure, there are a few paragraphs, maybe even an entire page here and there, that don't make your eyes bleed.  But for the most part, the writing is overly obvious, the attitudes forced, the descriptions repetitive, and some of them just flat out don't make sense.  “I couldn't see his face, but I could tell from the way he walked that he was a teenager." "I knew it was too good to be true when it got even better." There is even an instance when Meg can hear John blush.  Not hear his blush in his words.  Hear John blush.  Now I'll forgive a lot, but that is physically impossible.

But Meg's sudden bursts of super-human senses weren't even my biggest pet peeves.  No, that goes to the most retardedly used, beat-the-reader-over-the-head-with-it metaphor I have ever read.

Meg has blue hair.  She dyed it a while ago to stand out or announce her rebelliousness or whatever.  And don't worry about forgetting Meg has blue hair or mistaking it for purple or green down the line, because we are reminded of Meg's blue hair.  A lot.  A whole freaking lot.  Even more than we're told about John's dark eyes, we're reminded about Meg's blue hair.  It got to the point where I would let out an audible growl of frustration every time I read about the color of her hair.  I was growling a lot by the end of this novel.

And the thing is, she acts like it's a freaking stamp on her forehead proclaiming her a lecher or something.  I don't know about you, but I actually think a chick with blue hair is kinda hot.  Especially when they're not, you know, thirty.  Meg constantly tells herself John can't like her because she has blue hair.  When his friends point out the proprietary way he watches her, Meg's internal reaction is this; But my hair is blue!

Who.  The.  Eff.  Cares?

See, there’s this thing that happened to Meg in her past, a very bad thing that is made totally unbelievable by the totally crappy writing of Echols’.  Anyway, this thing has led to an immaturity and rebelliousness in Meg, and her blue hair is supposed to symbolize said immaturity and lack of self-growth.  Hence the metaphor.  It is pointed out and shoved down your throat so much that by the predictable ending, it’s downright insulting.

Now, since Going Too far is supposed to be a contemporary romance, I should probably add something about Officer John After, or Johnafter as Meg calls him.  While he’s not as infuriating as Meg herself, he’s still an impossible character to like.  I didn’t care about him.  His big “reveal” seemed only slightly less forced and overdone than Meg’s, and there was not a single scene in the entire novel that made me feel the chemistry between the two.  And more than a few that made me actively dislike them together.

I do not get how this book got so many positive reviews.  I really don't.  It is one of only two books I've ever rated one star, which should prove that I don't give this rating out lightly.  It actually makes me angry to think about it, and that has never happened before.

Huh.  Looks like I couldn’t write this review without dissolving into a puddle of gooey rage.  At least I kept the expletives out.

Going Too Far – 1 out of 5 stars