📚 Book Review 📚
Cross The Line 
Simone Soltani

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. 

The story follows Willow who goes through a break-up with one of her brother friends. She needs a chance to get away and work on her career. 

Dave, an F1 driver is in a hole. Reputation is in tatters, he is driving for a team who A) has a poor car and B) favours the owners son and the number 1 driver.

Dave needs to work on himself and push to get a seat at the end of the season and what better way to do that, than to hire Willow as his Social Media manager. 

The highs and lows, the spicy scenes, the romance...

Overall, a brilliant read and one of the better F1 romance's! 

"I mean , it was alright” - (Me)

Lauren Asher’s Dirty Air series was my foray into F1 romance and the sport itself. Before that , I thought it was synonymous with NASCAR. Because of my very limited knowledge on the sub-genre, I was excited to see what other author’s have to offer . In comes Simone Soltani’s Cross The Line

I don’t have strong feelings about this - just one big, resounding “meh.” It was easy background noise to accompany me while I did my chores, but nothing special in my eyes. Dev was hot (maybe it’s an accent thing, or maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t understand why they pronounced his name as “Dave”). Willow has my dream job, but they were both, as I said, just “meh.”

I was more invested in the tension and politics surrounding Dev and his team , club? (I don’t know sports, and I don’t feel like Googling the F1 equivalent of a football club) Argonaut Racing, as well as the racing scenes.

“Brother’s best friend” is my least favourite trope and I’ll just have to accept that it will never make sense to me when used as a point of conflict. It’s always such a frivolous hurdle in their relationship since it:

a) takes itself way too seriously,
b) borders on or is explicitly misogynistic
c) is just plain stupid

Cross the Line nearly avoided the sexist undertones of this trope by having the brother react decently. However, there were still mentions of Willow’s “innocence” and how Dev was “corrupting” her and so on.

Because I listened to it, I was more forgiving of the clunky pacing, but I drew the line at the epilogue. What the hell was that??? The editor should have asked the author to restructure some things . Why spend the whole book faffing about, only to start adding new plot points in the epilogue? Did Soltani miss the primary school lesson about not introducing completely new information in the conclusion? It’s one thing to wrap up character arcs, but this was just disorganised.

Audiobook mini-review

The female narrator (Nerissa Bradley) was sooooo one note , like wow , go girl, give us literally nothing . She sounded like she was forced record this. At least Dev’s narrator (Vikas Adams) gave me something.