Dare You To By Katie Mcgarry

Getting Started With Dare You To By Katie Mcgarry

Katie McGarry writes heavy contemporary romance, and Dare You To is one of her more accessible titles, but that doesn't mean it's light reading. The story follows Daphne, a college student dealing with trauma from a past relationship, and Bennett, the quiet guy working at the coffee shop near her therapy office. It was published in 2017 and sits outside her Pushing the Limits series, though the themes of mental health, trauma recovery, and complicated relationships are very familiar if you've read any of her other work. I picked this up after finishing Unraveled and honestly expected the same pace and emotional intensity. That's partly why I found it interesting — it moves differently than her other books, and if you're approaching it expecting another Breaking the Code-style slow burn, you might be thrown off by how quickly Daphne and Bennett actually connect. The romance develops steadily, but the real weight of the book is in Daphne's therapy sessions and how she learns to separate her past trauma from the present.

Where to Find Dare You To By Katie Mcgarry

The book is widely available as an ebook and audiobook across Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. The audiobook version, narrated by Grace Grant and Todd Hunter, gets good marks — Grant does a solid job with Daphne's internal monologue without overdoing the emotional vocals. For the print version, the trade paperback from Harlequin Teen is the standard edition and runs about 384 pages. If you're looking for a free copy, McGarry occasionally runs promotional campaigns on her newsletter and social media where she gives away ARCs or older titles. Her website and Goodreads group sometimes have code drops too. Nothing about this book is paywalled behind some tricky DRM scheme — it's standard Kindle or epub formatting once you acquire it. One thing I ran into when reading the ebook on a Kindle — the chapter breaks are a bit inconsistent. Some sections use a centered star separator and others just a blank line, which made scrolling feel jerky on my device. Not a dealbreaker, but worth noting if you're parsing the structure closely for a book club or essay.

What the Book Is Actually About

Daphne hasn't been herself since her ex, Garrett, manipulated her through gaslighting and emotional abuse during high school. She's only just started seeing a therapist and trying to rebuild her sense of self when she keeps running into Bennett at the campus coffee shop. He's the nephew of her therapist's friend, quiet, observant, and not interested in playing games. The central tension isn't whether they'll end up together — McGarry makes that clear early on — it's whether Daphne can convince herself she deserves someone good. The antagonist energy in this book comes less from a person and more from Daphne's own distorted self-perception. Garrett isn't even in the story for most of it, but his shadow drives her behavior. That's the counter-intuitive part for newcomers to McGarry's work: the abuser himself is barely a character, and the book spends more time on Daphne's therapy process than on dramatic confrontations. If you're reading for explosive love-triangle drama, this isn't that book. The supporting cast fills out reasonably well. Daphne's best friend Poppy provides the grounded friendship angle, and there's a minor subplot involving a friend from Daphne's past that ties into the bigger theme of learning to trust people again. It's all handled without melodrama, which I appreciate, though some readers find the supporting characters a little flat compared to the leads.

How to Read It and What to Expect

This book works best if you read it straight through in one or two sittings. It's not dense enough to require notes, but it's emotionally continuous enough that putting it down for a few days between chapters drains the momentum. I've tried reading McGarry books intermittently and it always feels like I'm missing the threading between scenes. The pacing is around 380 pages at a comfortable romance-novel reading speed, so roughly 3 to 4 hours for a casual reader. The prose itself is straightforward — no purple language, no overly literary flourishes. McGarry writes for accessibility, and that's intentional. The dialogue carries most of the emotional weight, and there are a few scenes that hit harder than the surrounding text because of how the conversation unfolds. A specific caveat: if you're sensitive to discussions of eating disorders, this book touches on that topic as part of Daphne's trauma response. It's not the central plot device like it is in Pushing the Limits, but it's present and handled with more care than McGarry's earlier work. Worth flagging in case you're picking this up for a young reader or a book club with mixed triggers.

Why People Either Love It or Skip It

The dividing line with this book usually comes down to what you want from a trauma-recovery romance. Readers who prioritize emotional authenticity over plot fireworks tend to rate it highly. The therapy scenes, while sometimes glossed over in favor of romantic moments, feel more grounded than McGarry's typical approach. Daphne's arc is believable — she stumbles, she has bad days, she doesn't get magically fixed by a boyfriend. The readers who write it off usually cite one of two things: the romance develops faster than they'd like, or the conflict feels internal rather than external. There's no dramatic third-act breakup with a miscommunication that could've been solved by a single honest conversation. Instead, the climax is Daphne choosing herself, and Bennett respecting that choice. Some find that empowering, others find it anticlimactic. Both readings are valid. The writing quality itself is competent but unremarkable. McGarry isn't trying to win literary prizes here. She's writing what she knows — mental health struggles wrapped in a romance structure — and doing it with a consistency that her fanbase trusts. The dialogue is naturalistic, the pacing is reliable, and the ending lands without tying up every loose thread, which I think is appropriate for a story about ongoing healing.

If you finish it and want something similar, It's Not Summer We're Leaving explores trauma and friendship in a comparable way, and Violently Happy hits the same therapeutic-romance beats with a male trauma perspective. If you want something lighter from McGarry, Spiral is more romance-forward with less psychological weight. Just don't go into Dare You To By Katie Mcgarry expecting the same intensity as Breaking the Code — it's a different kind of story underneath the same roof.