Reviewed by Gannon Carr
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
4 stars

Who can’t remember those angst filled teen years when the least little thing seemed a matter of life and death.  Jennifer Echols has written an outstanding young adult novel that captures that time and all those emotions.  Meg is a troubled teenager in a small town in Alabama.  She wants nothing more than to leave home after graduation and never look back.  Until then, she seems destined to stir up trouble.  One night, she and her boyfriend and two of their friends decide to hang out on the railroad bridge outside of town, drinking and making out.  What they don’t count on is the police showing up and putting the kibosh on their teenage shenanigans.

Officer John After cannot believe that these four foolish kids are hanging out on this bridge, risking their lives.  Years ago, a young couple was killed by a train on the same bridge, and John can’t let that happen again.  In fact, patrolling the bridge late at night has become his mission, for reasons of his own.  He wants to scare these kids “straight” after their encounter, so he and the rest of the police department come up with a plan.  Each of the kids will spend their spring break riding around with the police department, fire department and ambulance services, respectively.  The only one who is off the hook is Eric, Meg’s boyfriend.  He’s the local pot-smoking bad boy whose daddy just happens to be a local attorney with a habit of getting Eric out of any tight spot he squeezes his way into.  Not only is Meg going to miss her spring break in Miami, but she has to spend the week riding shotgun with Officer After.

Meg is something of the town “bad girl”; with her blue hair, suggestive clothing and wild behavior, she has earned her title.  But Meg uses all of this as a shield to keep anyone from getting too close and as a means of avoiding who she really is and all of her emotional baggage.  It takes her awhile to realize that Officer After is just a year older than her; in fact, he was in her Spanish class last year.  But he seems much more mature and in Meg’s opinion, he’s too uptight.  So when she feels some attraction toward him, it freaks her out.  But when she notices that the attraction is mutual, she wonders if maybe a bad girl and a rookie cop can be together.

John graduated at the top of his class, but gave up a scholarship to UAB to stay home and become a cop.  He feels compelled to serve and protect and enforce the law.  When he catches Meg and her friends on the bridge, he is furious with them and their total disregard for the law and hopes to teach them all a lesson that they won’t forget.  But having Meg with him on the job for a week turns out nothing like John expects.  In trying to teach her a lesson, he just may learn something about himself.

Going Too Far is a romantic and tender story about two lost souls whose unlikely friendship blossoms into something far deeper.  Meg and John have both dealt with tragedy and loss and wounded spirits that they are, they each hide behind the barriers they have erected, thinking it will protect them from further hurt.  They learn that if they trust one another, they can drop those walls and start to truly live.  Great dialogue and appealing characters make Going Too Far a book worth reading, no matter what your age.