Thank you so much to Daisy Thorn & Luna Literacy for the eARC of this book. 

So many things drew me into this ARC opportunity. Hockey is without a doubt my favorite type of sports romance to read, and this book was said to have a disabled main character. My curiosity was more than piqued, and I was happy to give this new-to-me author a try. 

The beginning of this book DREW. ME. IN.  I was hooked like a fish on a line. My heart was pounding so fast I had to literally use my hand to cover the screen and read one line at a time. I was scared, panicked, and sweating as we experienced our FMC’s career altering accident in gruesome, visceral detail right along with her. 

Personal, yet relevant, tangent: I was a competitive dancer growing up and I had a career ending injury when I was seventeen. Reading this scene (and her recovery) was HARD but oh my god, so well done. For the most part. 

I genuinely wasn’t sure how our two main characters, an injured figure skater and a hair trigger anger issues hockey player, would end up orbiting one another. The forced proximity created a really fun bubble where their reality became each other, not the outside world. I loved this little cabin nestled next to a frozen lake in a small town where everyone knows everyone (especially because both our main characters are stupidly famous). The setting was such a contrast to our characters emotional and physical wellbeing, but it was clear from the beginning that this location would be a haven for them both. 

Each character had such big personalities. They were like fire and ice always battling with one another in wit, verbal sparring, and later on trying to out spice the other. It was so fun watching these characters grow and evolve together. Each one carried many emotional challenges including childhood abuse/trauma, depression and anxiety attacks, and it was so rewarding as the reader to watch them unwind and work through those tough to navigate issues. 

This story definitely borrows elements from dark romance when it comes to the spice. Our MMC says the darndest things, and boy oh boy did I eat it up! Our hockey star definitely has a breeding kink, as well as a laundry list of others that were so fun to explore. 

Now comes the tricky part as a reader and reviewer who is disabled. I wish I had known our character would get back on her feet. Literally. I went into this story thinking that the character would be permanently disabled and was going to learn to navigate life through this new lens, like many of us who become disabled (and are not born disabled) are forced to do. 

Fortunately for our character, she has a miraculous recovery (maybe a little too miraculous), in which she states her inability to walk was just all in her head. But it wasn’t. She had a broken bone that, perhaps temporarily, damaged or inflamed her spinal cord, causing her paralysis. Sure it’s medically possible for that kind of swelling to go down and for the damage to be reversible, for sensation to come back in the form of tingles and then outright feeling, but to say it was all in her head and that she wouldn’t let herself walk because of some mental block felt like it undermined and invalidated the very real trauma her mind and body experienced through her accident. 

I’m not angry at the author for writing a story where the character got better in a case where that is a plausible, medically accurate, potential outcome. I think this is an example of when a sensitivity reader’s, or a reader who has experienced something similar, input could have been useful. Maybe I’m misunderstanding that scene altogether coming from my own lived bias and experiences as someone with both a career ending injury and permanent life long disabilities. It feels very weird that after she gets out of her wheelchair in an emergency and runs for the first time since her accident, she has one additional check up with her doctors and then immediately jumps back into her old life as if the accident had never happened. 

I made the choice to wait to post my reviews until this book was released into the world. The more I sit with this story, and the way the disability arc was handled, the more frustrated I feel (which is a shame because I genuinely enjoyed the writing and the characters up until that pivotal moment). I opened up this discussion, without mentioning the book or author on Bluesky to get some additional opinions. (You can view these posts on my blog)

As of this moment, I would not recommend this book to readers looking for good or positive disability representation.