Confession Number 1: I’m drawn to books by their cover. I’ll admit it. A few months ago I started seeing twitter blow up with pictures of a new book called Nowhere But Here by Katie McGarry and it seemed to be the hot (literally) book of the summer. The colors caught my eye so I purchased it and saved it for vacation.
Confession Number 2: At the start of the book I wondered what the heck I got myself into by wanting to read a book about a motorcycle gang (that is not at all what they turned out to be).
Confession Number 3: The release of book 2 in the Thunder Road series could not come soon enough. I have spent the last few days wanting to read more. I’m as hooked as I was on the Stephanie Plum series, unfortunately there isn’t 25 books to spend my time catching up on.
With my confessions out of the way, let’s talk about Nowhere But Here.
Synopsis
Emily is sent to Snowflake, Kentucky with her adoptive father and biological mother to say goodbye to her biological father’s mother who passed away. A surprise of a lifetime at the funeral sets Emily on a hunt through her past that she didn’t expect.
Oz, an 18 year old boy hoping to join his father’s motorcycle club & security company is charged with protecting Emily while she visits Snowflake. He is the only one she trusts and their feelings towards each other make his job more difficult than he expected.
“Like you know anything about living. You never take a risk!”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“But not fully engaged. When the hell are you going to step outside of yourself and experience what’s going on around you? You have a huge family I would kill to be blood-related to and you can’t appreciate it to save your life!”
― Nowhere But Here
Together they discover their past, their family history & secrets that only a select few members of the club knew existed.
My Thoughts
As I mentioned above, motorcycle gangs are really not my thing. For some reason the excitement behind Nowhere But Here had me hooked and I had to know what it was about. Once I started reading, I completely understood.
Katie McGarry is a fantastic author.
While there were some expected parts of the book (boy meets girl, they hate each other, love each other, etc) there was a lot of unexpected parts. The entire back story with Emily’s mom was not even close to what I had expected. I loved watching her relationship with Eli (her biological father) unfold as Olivia (her grandmother) slowly dropped hints to her.
While the book did heavily revolve around a motorcycle club, I never once felt like it was completely out of place for me to read knowing nothing about motorcycles. The book was so focused on family & relationships in the club, that it was easy to ignore the “hard core biker” stereotype that typically comes along with a book like this.
Usually it takes about 50% of a book before I hit the “can’t put it down” point, I was pretty hooked on this one from the start. I read it over three days while we were on vacation but could have easily sat down and read it in one day.
The book is classified as Young Adult and I would say it qualifies as a little bit of an Older Young Adult. There are a few references and language that probably wouldn’t be pre-teen appropriate. For the most part the book is focused on a young girl discovering her past while falling in love.
While I can’t wait for Thunder Road book 2 to come out, I’ve downloaded Katie McGarry’s first series, Pushing the Limits to tie me over for a bit.
Have you read Nowhere But Here? Are you hooked?