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Review for The Do-Over by Georgia Beers

The Summary:

Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough to forget the past, forge ahead, and create a terrific life. Bella Hunt has done exactly that, complete with a successful career, a gaggle of close friends, and a home she loves. Life is good.

Or it was, until her teenage nightmare and the bane of her high school existence shows up for Bella’s class on conflict resolution. Easton Evans, in all her pretty, blond, my-parents-are-surgeons glory, throws Bella into an existential tailspin as her unpleasant memories from her past come screeching back. Easton doesn’t even recognize Bella, and what’s worse, Easton is...different somehow. Softer, kinder. And still unfairly attractive. None of it computes in Bella’s head. She’s hated Easton for fifteen years, done her best to scrub the past away. But now here it is. The past. Sitting in her classroom and waiting for Bella to teach her how to resolve a conflict of the heart.

The Short of It:

The Do-Over is a Georgia Beers novel, so you know going into things that you won’t be reading a bad novel. While I’m far from an avid follower of Beers’s work, I have read Calendar Girl and Starting From Scratch, both of which I enjoyed. With that in mind, I didn’t go into this novel expecting it to break new ground, but I did have higher expectations than I likely would have had reviewing a novel by a less experienced authour.  The book was just about exactly what I expected. The novel is fun, sometimes fluffy, and Beers continues to show off her abilities to make the sparks fly with a sizzling first kiss. The story is predictable, with a climactic conflict that feels more than a little contrived, though the resolution of the conflict manages to satisfy. The leads are relatable and engaging, and the supporting cast is memorable and interesting. Ultimately, The Do-Over isn’t a book that’s going to surprise many people, but I doubt it’s in danger of disappointing many people either. I think you’ll know from the description whether this is a novel you want to read. If an angst-light second chances romance isn’t what you’re looking for, the novel doesn’t throw any curve balls to capture your interest regardless, and if it is, you’ll probably find exactly what you’re looking for.

The Long of it:

I’m going to start with the thing that bothered me most about this novel. Predictable stories are fine, and I don’t mind a contrived conflict, but there’s something incredibly disappointing about a contrived conflict you can see coming from a mile away, so you spend half the book hoping that when it finally happens it’ll at least defy your expectations, but no it’s exactly what you expected and it’s just… disappointing. That’s kind of how it is with The Do-Over. I could see the conflict coming from the start, saw exactly how the tropes would dictate it should resolve, and I sat there telling myself “these are two grown women, one of them attending a class on conflict resolution, one of them *teaching* it; I’m sure those conflict resolution skills will get put into practice, right?” Considering that conflict resolution is the premise and essentially the tagline of the novel, it would have been nice to see it actually matter. The final resolution is sweet and satisfying, but I think it would have been much more so if it hadn’t all felt so contrived.

That actually ties in somewhat with my other major gripe, which is that many if not all of the various sub-plots and secondary threads don’t feel properly resolved. Take Easton’s problems with employees that neither like nor trust her, for example. They kick off the novel, and they’re brought up throughout it, and the book provides what feels like the beginning of a resolution, but then the book ends and it feels like it just kind of forgot to follow through. It does something similar with some of its ostensibly important side characters. Easton has a daughter - her daughter is supposed to be real important to her, as daughters should be. In the back half of the book though, she feels like an afterthought?

Maybe the problem is that despite these two characters coming together, their worlds feel like they never actually cross. Bella and Easton never really meet each other’s friends, Bella doesn’t really even establish much of any of a relationship with Easton’s daughter… I think the book could have benefited a lot from an epilogue actually. It would have provided the opportunity to actually show all those loose ends and threads after they were wrapped up, even if we didn’t get to see much of the actual wrapping.

I’m heaping a lot of criticism on the novel, and not really balancing it out with equivalent praise, and I hope that doesn’t give the impression that this is a bad novel. My criticism for this book is just more pointed than my praise. It’s a fun novel, with a sweet romance between two very likeable and relatable women. Despite my complaints, I definitely enjoyed it, and was sad to see it end.  

The Verdict:

This is a good book. I don’t think it’s an amazing book, but it’s definitely a good book, and worth the price of admission. It’s a quality addition to Beers’s extensive catalogue of work, and though it certainly won’t be a defining book for her career, it won’t disappoint her fans either. I’d rate this book 3.5/5 stars, rounding up to 4 because sites like goodreads generally skew overly positive.

[ladylilacreviews]

Review for Breaking the Ice by K.R. Collins

The Summary:

Sophie Fournier is the first woman drafted into the North American Hockey League. Playing hockey is something she’s done all her life, but she faces new challenges as she finds her place on the struggling Concord Condors. She has to prove herself better than her rival-turned-teammate, Michael Hayes, and her rival-turned-friend, Dmitri Ivanov, and she has to do it all with a smile.

If she’s successful then she opens the door to other women being drafted. She can’t afford to think about what happens if she fails. All she knows is this: if she’s not the best then she doesn’t get to play.

No pressure, though.

The Short of It:

The fact that I finished this book at 3:30 in the morning on a workday, the morning after I decided to start it, realized I could manage *maybe* a few hours sleep before I had to wake up again to start my day, and decided “Yes that was absolutely worth it” is perhaps the most glowing review I have for Breaking the Ice by K.R. Collins. It’s not so often these days that I stay up from dusk until dawn because I absolutely need to see a book through to the end right this moment, rest, work, and every other real world circumstance be damned, so when that does happen, I always make note of the book responsible as being something particularly special. Rest assured, Breaking the Ice is absolutely something special.

The Long of It:

What makes this book special? It’s a sports novel, which is a genre that I as somebody who doesn’t follow traditional sports at all have a strangely deep fascination with. However, unlike many sports novels, it manages a feat I consider especially valuable within the genre - it remains interesting and engaging without demanding a deep, or even really a basic knowledge of the sport in question. Hockey is perhaps a particularly good choice of sport for managing this, as the combination of blistering speed, high-octane action, and a healthy dose of violence have in my opinion always rendered hockey one of the easier sports to just dive in and watch and enjoy without really understanding the game as it plays out in front of you. The nuances of strategy aren’t so important as the speed and intensity playing out right in front of you and it is this feeling that Breaking the Ice replicates especially well. The hockey scenes in this book (and there are plenty of them) are cinematic, and from our perspective seeing everything through protagonist Sophie’s eyes, we experience that intensity, the frantic pace of the game and the desperate moments on the ice intimately.

This brings us to the second thing that makes Breaking the Ice special, which is that before being a novel about hockey, this is a novel about Sophie Sophie, the first female player to ever be drafted into the NAHL, who carries the burden of representing the entire female gender within the eyes of the hockey-loving population, who faces discrimination and harassment and so many people telling her “you don’t deserve to be here” even as she proves time and time again that she doesn’t just have what it takes to be good, she has what it takes to be the best. Hockey is the vessel for this character-centric journey, and the fact that Breaking the Ice never strayed from placing Sophie, her character development, and her various relationships with the teammates, friends, and family surrounding her above the game that acts as the framework for her story is something I value tremendously.

Speaking of Sophie, she is just an exceptional character overall. She isn’t always likeable; sometimes it seems like she’s awfully out of touch with her emotions, and at times she makes decisions that will frustrate many readers to no end, but this all contributes to making her feel real. She’s a girl who loves hockey with all her heart, who wants to spend her whole life playing it, but her status as the first woman to break into the big leagues means she has to be so much more than that, and *that* struggle more than anything else is what carries this book forward.

Sophie is also surrounded by a fairly strong supporting cast of characters. I can’t really give the supporting cast the same glowing endorsement I’ve given the rest of the book, because at times these characters seemed to just blend together, and especially in the earlier parts of the book, didn’t really stand out from each other. Lack of proper introduction seemed to play a role in this. One of the stand out moments for me that highlights this issue was actually a rather nondescript passage in the book, during one of the games in which Sophie passes the puck to a character named X. I actually paused my reading and jotted down a note in by notebook to let the publisher know that i thought I’d encountered a moment where a placeholder name hadn’t been replaced with an actual name. It wasn’t until quite a bit later in the book when X appeared a few more times that I realized X was actually the nickname for one of the players on Sophie’s team. I couldn’t even tell you if his real name ever came up; I spent most of his appearances just trying to figure out who on earth he was in the first place.

When they’re given proper time in the spotlight and allowed to develop, some of these supporting characters shine. Ivanov was simply delightful, and I loved the dynamic of ‘we’ve been painted by the casters as huge rivals but screw it let’s just watch TV together and be friends’. As far as Sophie’s teammates are concerned, team captain Matty was somebody I really liked. Garfield, Zhang, and Kevlar were important nods to other minorities who face less overtly visible discrimination and harassment than Sophie. Other side characters such as Merlin were great fun once we go to know them, and through their interactions and relationships with Sophie contributed to making her the complex and dynamic protagonist that she is.

The Verdict:

I think highly of this book. Very highly. I wavered between 4 and 4.5 stars for a good long while, and though I ultimately settled on a 4 star rating, that has less to do with quality and more to do with impact. Breaking the Ice is a fun, exciting, quality read about the very real struggles and challenges faced by a woman breaking into a space dominated by men, framed as a sports novel. However, I typically reserve 4.5 star reviews for books that either totally transform or subvert my expectations for the genre. Breaking the Ice, though excellent, did not do that. Make no mistake though; if anything about this book catches your interest even a little, and even if you don’t think anything about it does, this is a book that is absolutely well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

This unbiased review was provided in exchange for a free ARC from the publisher via Netgalley

You can find more of my reviews on my review blog https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ladylilacreviews