Twenty-year-old Camryn Bennett had always been one to think out-of-the-box, who knew she wanted something more in life than following the same repetitive patterns and growing old with the same repetitive life story. And she thought that her life was going in the right direction until everything fell apart.

Determined not to dwell on the negative and push forward, Camryn is set to move in with her best friend and plans to start a new job. But after an unexpected night at the hottest club in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, she makes the ultimate decision to leave the only life she’s ever known, far behind. With a purse, a cell phone and a small bag with a few necessities, Camryn, with absolutely no direction or purpose boards a Greyhound bus alone and sets out to find herself.

What she finds is a guy named Andrew Parrish, someone not so very different from her and who harbors his own dark secrets. But Camryn swore never to let down her walls again. And she vowed never to fall in love. But with Andrew, Camryn finds herself doing a lot of things she never thought she’d do. He shows her what it’s really like to live out-of-the-box and to give in to her deepest, darkest desires.

On their sporadic road-trip he becomes the center of her exciting and daring new life, pulling love and lust and emotion out of her in ways she never imagined possible. But will Andrew’s dark secret push them inseparably together, or tear them completely apart?

It seems all Camryn does is attract problems, drama and broken hearts. In her young life she’s already said goodbye to a boyfriend—dead in an accident—, saw her brother be sentenced to jail after killing a man in a car crash and suffered with the divorce of her parents, after her mom discovered her dad was having an affair. Now she is herself betrayed and has a fight with her best friend. Maybe Camryn’s place in life is away from all of it, right?

That’s why she decides to go away. She decides to hit the road with no certain destination—choosing Idaho at first simply because the lady at the bus station was eating potatoes!—, trying to find herself. What she does find, though, it’s more than just that. Camryn runs into Andrew Parrish, a young man who is taking the bus from Texas to Wyoming, on his way to say goodbye to his ill father.

Andrew has his own collection of problems, dramas and broken hearts. Together, Andrew and Camryn learn how to live in the now, in the present, and mend what they thought was broken forever.

The Edge of Never is like a bitch slap. We start reading this book expecting a romance, but we get lots of lessons about life before even understanding the characters. Full of life facts, the narrative gives us perspective about living and loving, and we found ourselves compelled to understand more about these amazing characters. When we get to the romance part, it is well build and makes sense, along making us horny—that’s how good this aspect was.

Its the kind of book that brings life lessons without being cheesy, without making you cringe. Redmerski has made a beautiful job. The book is about emotional growing, and Jessica’s narrative put every feeling, need and change in a wonderful way.

Books with the power of The Edge of Never are rare, as it is a story about loving yourself first to then love someone, even if you end up loving this someone more than your own life. That’s an amazing lesson to teach, as much as it is an amazing lesson to learn, and Camryn and Andrew’s journey is all about that.

Author: J.A. Redmerski
Country: United States
Language: English
Genre(s): New Adult, Contemporary Fiction, Romance
Publisher: CreateSpace
Publication date: November 16, 2012
Pages: 425
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Our favorite quotes on this book are bellow.

I hate to say it, but shit really does happen. You just have to get over it. Beat the hell out of it by doing things that make you happy.

So often I sit around and think about life and wonder about every possible aspect of it. I wonder what the hell I’m doing here. Even right now. In this coffee shop with this girl I’ve known practically all my life. Yesterday I thought about why I felt the need to get up at exactly the same time as the day before and do everything like I did the day before. Why? What compels any of us to do the things we do when deep down a part of us just wants to break free from it all?

“How can you not like Brandon Boyd?”
“He’s alright,” I say. “I’m just not into advertising him on my chest.”

The truth is, we all have problems; we all go through hardships and pain, and my pain is paradise compared to a lot of people’s and I really have no right to whine at all.

Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.
That’s completely asinine.
The truth is that adults love in different ways, not the only way. I loved Ian in the now, the way he looked at me, how he made my stomach swim, how he held my hair when I was puking my guts up after eating a bad enchilada.
That’s love.
I adore my parents, but long before their divorce the last time my mom was sick, the most my dad did for her was bring up the Pepto-Bismol and ask where the remote control was on his way out.
Whatever.

My lips smile, but my face doesn’t. It’ll take a while before any of my smiles directed at him can be genuine. Genuine smiles can sometimes give the wrong impression. At least this way, I can be civil and kind, but not the civil kind who after a few big smiles ends up in a trunk with their throat slit.

It’s my future and my life and I can’t make myself live the way someone else wants me to.

I’m not violent in general, only to douchebags and occasionally, myself.

I can tell there’s an attraction. Though small, I sense it. And it can’t really be because of the way I look—hell, my breath probably smells like ass right now and I haven’t had a shower today—if it was because of looks, unlike most girls who are ever into me, she turned me down already. She didn’t want me sitting next to her on that bus. She wasn’t shy to tell me to turn my music down, with a snippy-ass attitude at that. She got pissed when I accused her of having Bieber Fever (it pisses me off that I even know what the fuck that means—I blame that on society) and I get the feeling that she would have no problem kicking me in the nuts if I touched her in an inappropriate way. Not that I would. Hell no. But it’s good to know that she’s the type.
Hell yeah, I like this girl.

I wonder if his thoughts are the same as mine. I also wonder, more than I want to admit, why so many of his thoughts already make me feel like I’m staring into a mirror when I look at him.

I’m alone again. Over a thousand miles away from home. No direction, no purpose, no goals other than to find myself on this journey I never imagined I could bring myself to begin. And I’m scared. But I have to do this. I have to because I need this time alone, away from everything back home which brought me here in the first place.

Everybody starts out as strangers.

Just because one person’s problem is less traumatic than another’s doesn’t mean they’re required to hurt less.

A wave of unrestricted pleasure shudders through my entire body. His words shock me into submission. My heart is telling me to say one thing. My mind is telling me to say another. But I can’t hear what the fuck either one of them are saying because of this feeling between my legs that just keeps getting more and more impossible to ignore.

What is Andrew Parrish doing to me?
Whatever it is I don’t think I want it to stop.

His face spreads into a warm smile. “As a matter of fact, no, I have never slept under the stars – are you gettin’ all romantic on me, Camryn Bennett?”

Whether it was about sleeping next to a pile of cow shit or under a bridge overpass next to a homeless drunk-I would sleep anywhere with her.

I never was one to listen to reason when it came to something that I wanted, but with Camryn, I’m finding myself telling reason to fuck off a lot more than usual.

“I don’t think you ever really fall out of love with someone,” I say and see a flicker of thought move through her eyes. “I think when you fall in love, like true love, it’s love for life. All the rest is just experience and delusions.”

We’ve slept next to each other and touched one another, yet still here we are, standing on opposite sides of a thick glass wall. We reach up and touch our fingers to the glass, we look into each others eyes and we know what we want but the glass won’t fucking budge. This is either inviolable discipline or pure, unadulterated self-torture.

Two people unable to cry finally cry together and in the world ended today, we would be fulfilled.

The heart always wins out over the mind. The heart, although reckless and suicidal and a masochist all on its own, always gets its way. The mind may be what’s best, but I don’t give a shit what my mind is telling me anymore. Right now, I just want to live in the moment.

I could die in this bed with him right now, wrapped in his arms and I would never know that I had died.

I’ve never been this happy before. I didn’t know happiness like this existed.

Coincidence is just the conformist term for fate.

And it clicked in my head that I wasn’t there because it’s what I wanted, I was there because it’s what people expected, even people I don’t know, society. It’s what people do. They grow up, go to college, get a job and do the same shit every day for the rest of their lives until they grow old and die—just like you explained that night you told me about yours and your ex’s plans.

I’m sorry, Cam, but that’s just too much coincidence—you two were meant to be together. It’s like some wicked fucking fairytale love story that you just can’t make up, y’know?

“Guys that perfect are rare.”
“Well, he’s not perfect,” I say, sloshing my straw around in my cup. “He’s got a dirty mouth, he’s stubborn, he forces me to do shit I don’t want to do and he always gets his way.”
Natalie grins and sucks on her straw.
Then she points at me briefly. “See, like I said: perfect.”

I have never lived the way I lived during my short time with you. For the first time in my life, I’ve felt whole, alive, free. You were the missing piece of my soul, the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins. I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I’ve known you for a short time, but I feel like I’ve known you forever.