Confession 1: I have rewritten the quote used for the title of this review. The actual line from the book is “Katarina Shaw was in the building, and that bitch had come to win.” but I didn’t want to swear in the title of a review.
Katarina (Kat) Shaw and Heath Rocha are ice dancers with Olympic aspirations, while they have talent they don’t exactly have much support (emotionally or financially) from the people in their lives. Kat’s mother died when she was six, and while her father was supportive, he also passed when she was still a kid. This left her in the care of her older brother, who did not share Kat’s passion for skating, or share Kat’s feelings towards Heath. Heath is an orphan, who was taken in by Kat’s dad and is very much in love with Kat, so he’s in love with ice dancing for her. Sure, Kat loves Heath too, but she needs to make it to the Olympics to fulfill her dream, and she is going to do what it takes to get there.
It ends up taking a lot. Kat and Heath come together, separate, and deal with a lot of drama on and off the ice. They are not the most emotionally healthy people, and that is reflected in the text and their actions. As the story is told from Kat’s point of view, I feel a little more sympathy for her, while I am just generally frustrated by Heath.
Confession 2: I was influenced to read this book by two people I follow on TickTock and went and got it based on that recommendation. That meant that I was way too far into the book when my brain made the connection between the names of the main characters (Katarina and Heath) and that Heath being so broody and moody and obsessed with Kat was because this story was inspired in part by Wuthering Heights. Having finished the book and read the synopsis, it says it right there in that yes, this had some Wuthering Heights inspiration.
The book is told both from Kat’s point of view and as transcripts from a documentary being made about Kat and Heath’s ice dancing career. In the previously mentioned recommendations for the book, I heard “for fans of Daisy Jones and the Six” and I think it was that interview style format in both books that caused that recommendation. Personally, beyond that, I don’t really see much that links them, beyond having female leads that are messy (which no complaints from me, people are messy, and I’m fine with reading about messy women.)
And to be clear Kat and Heath are walking disasters in this book, but so are many of the supporting characters. There is a ton of mess, breakups and make-ups, characters making dramatic exits and then even more dramatic returns, injuries, a character that runs a gossip blog about figure skating and stirs the pot, intense coaches, bitter rivalries between the American and Russian skaters – its a lot! And I ate it all up. It did at times feel like I was reading a soap opera, and I mean some pretty wild things happen in this book that stretched my sense of disbelief a bit.
But then I remembered everything that happened between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. Although the book’s events are wilder, Nancy and Tonya kept coming to mind while reading it. Sports can be wild, and people can indeed do crazy things to try to win Olympic gold.
Confession 3: Kat and Heath are ice dancers – and that is not a sport that I have a whole lot of knowledge of. I am one of those people who will watch figure skating during the Olympics, but I typically watch the women’s skate and then the pairs and that is it. I don’t feel that my lack of knowledge impacted my enjoyment of the book. Ice dancing is a major part of the book, and lots of the action takes place on the ice and in rinks, it didn’t get overly technical in the descriptions. As I am not overly knowledgeable about the sport, this didn’t bother me. And to be clear – I loved this book. It was crazy, it was over the top, and I ate it all up.
Overall I found it to be a frothy novel, that grabbed my attention and kept it, even while being somewhat over-the-top (and then going past that into being just straight up over the top). Kat is not always the most likeable, but she stays true to her character throughout the whole book. (I can only fault her for being so into Heath. I’m sorry but that character just – no. No.) I can even forgive the ending that felt a bit too neat because the rest of this book entertained me so much.