We are closer to the end of the Winter Olympics than we are to the start so for today, I’ve got some novels with sports in them for you. They’re not all winter sports, but some of them are. There are also a whole bunch that I’ve read and not liked and haven’t included here – although I have included one of my more recent sports reads, because it made me cross and I needed to talk about it! And also the book that I was hoping to replace it with has also made me cross, but in a less interesting way. Anyway, I’ve also already written a Recommendsday about sports romances, so if you haven’t had enough yet, you can find that there.
The Favourites by Layne Fargo
Given that all the drama that came out of the Ice Dancing results (if you haven’t read about it yet, here are some articles), I couldn’t not start with Layne Fargo’s book about ice dance from last year. I wrote a bonus review about it around the time of Worlds last year, but it’s so much fun that it bears a repeat. This has got a scrappy wrong side of the tracks pairing taking on the world of ice dancing, and is framed through a documentary being made ten years after their final skate. It’s got lots of drama, the bits of the sport that Fargo has tinkered with are cleverly chosen and you don’t have to know anything about skating to enjoy it. I’m a huge figure skating fan – until Tuesday night I had watched every minute of competition this games, and this is one of the very few books I’ve read set in a sport that I’m a keen follower of that hasn’t managed to really annoy me in one way or another. There’s a reason why I haven’t read many/any of the figure skater (usually with a hockey player) romances that are having a resurgence at the moment. I read a few a couple of Olympics ago (Pyeongchang games I think) and they really wound me up and I haven’t been back since. But this I can really recommend.
Isn’t It Bromantic by Lyssa Kay Adams
I’ve got an ice hockey-related romance for you now, and it’s not Heated Rivalry! Isn’t it Bromantic is the fourht book in the Bromance Book Club series, which have a couple of sporting heros. The first in the series had a baseball player hero who is trying to win his estranged wife back with the help of a secret romance book club for men, and the other books follow the other members of the group. Isn’t It Bromantic’s hero is Vlad aka The Russian who is a professional ice hockey player in Nashville. Years earlier back in Russia, he married one of his childhood friends to help her after her journalist father disappeared. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but Vlad has decided he wants more and is using the book club to try and work out how to win his wife’s love. This was the story in the series that I had been looking forward to maybe the most and although it didn’t quite live upto all my hopes it was still a fun read even if it did have far too many tropes all mashed in together. I found the series as a whole a bit uneven – full of great ideas but not always as good in the execution, which was a bit frustrating, but I don’t think any of them were actually bad if you know what I mean.
Cross The Line by Simone Soltani
Dev is a Formula One driver who may have blown up his career prospects with a social media disaster Willow is his best friend’s little sister who is full of ideas but struggling to get a job out of college. Dev hires Willow to help with his image problem, but the two of them struggle to keep it professional as their feelings threaten to get the better of them. I am a massive Formula One fan, and have been for as long as I can remember and really I think this may make me a bad candidate for reading F1-set romances, because I will pick at the sporting detail. All that aside, this one has a massive plot device that it uses towards the end but then leaves unresolved that really, really wound me up. In fact it annoyed me to the point that I went back and read the final chapter and the epilogue again the day after I read it, because I had finished it late at night and I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t missed something. I hadn’t. So, all in all frustrating. And as I said at the top, it made me cross and I wanted to talk about it, but also people who know I read romance and like F1 often ask me if I’ve read any of the booming trend for F1 romances and so now I’m reporting back!
Happy Humpday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 