“That must be love: when everything else in the world could implode and you wouldn’t care as long as you had that one person standing beside you.”

Beth Risk is constantly protecting her mother–an alcoholic whose boyfriend beats both her and Beth–because she is afraid that her mother would be sent to jail and Beth would be all alone. When her uncle comes back into her life and tells Beth that she can either come live with him or else he’ll send her mother to jail, Beth is left with no choice but to leave the only home she knows for a place where she doesn’t fit in. Ryan Stone is a popular jock who is the complete opposite of Beth, yet for some reason the two feel drawn together after a dare forces them to cross paths. Beth is hesitant to let Ryan into her life, and to allow herself to trust someone with her secrets.

I loved this book!! At first it kind of had a She’s All That vibe–popular guy’s friends dare him to ask out the loner girl who he then falls for–but the story is so much more than that. Ryan’s life seems perfect from the outside, but the reality is that his brother is no longer allowed to come home and his parents’ marriage is almost nonexistent anymore. His father is the type that pushes him into playing baseball all the time so that he can make it into the majors, but while Ryan loves to play, he also has another talent. Ryan is basically trapped in his life until Beth comes along and helps him to realize that he doesn’t have to live out the life his father dictates for him. What’s great is that Ryan has a really decent group of friends that take Beth in as one of their own.

Beth has a constant need to protect her mother, even though her mother treats her horribly and falls right back into her bad habits. She goes to live with her uncle in his gorgeous new house and gets to go to a good school but she still wants to run away to save her mother. I admired her loyalty to her mother but at the same time I was really angry because a girl her age should not have to take care of her mother the way she did. When Beth meets Ryan she doesn’t believe that he could ever really care about a girl like her who comes from a broken home. It takes a lot for her to finally trust him, and I loved seeing how her walls finally started to come down.

What’s great about this book also is that we still get to see flashes of Noah and Echo from Pushing the Limits. It was great to see what they have been up to and how their lives have changed.

Overall, Dare You To was a great love story that had a lot of depth to the characters. It is not simply a sappy romance but rather a story of two teens with real issues who learn to overcome those issues together. I think this book is my favorite of the series.

Dare You To was released on May 28, 2013 and is the second book in the Pushing the Limits series. The third book, Crash Into You will be released on November 26, 2013.