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Finally, a [mostly] accurate figure skating novel

After reading *They Never Learn*, I was impatient for Layne Fargo to write another book. When that book was about ice dance, I lost my mind. I am a staunch fan of figure skating and have been for years. The underrated discipline of ice dance has always been my favorite (ha), and I was so happy to finally see it represented in fiction. I was especially grateful to see figure skating represented in fiction by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about – listen, I liked *Icebreaker* plenty, but the rants I subjected my coworkers to about the inaccuracies of skating basics had them fantasizing about my murder.

Fargo crafts unlikeable characters expertly. Every single character is unlikeable but has just enough redeeming characteristics for the reader to still care about their fate. They are also all complicated and unlikeable in unique ways, making their interactions compelling.

Despite their huge flaws, I was very invested in hoping for a positive outcome for all the characters, even Ellis. I was very stressed for them the whole time. Kat and Heath are obviously toxic, but I hoped they’d be able to grow and settle into a good relationship.

My small criticisms of this book: it should have been shorter, and some of the dramatic incidents should have been cut. Figure skating is indeed a very dramatic sport, but several of the incidents in this book felt like `__` overkill to me. I can see hints of the Tonya Harding story, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s chemistry (and they’re rivalry and close training relationship with Meryl Davis and Charlie White), creepy commentaries about Maia and Alex Shibutani, and the judging scandal at the 2002 Olympics regarding the scores of pairs skating teams Jamie Salé and David Pelletier and Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. I appreciate the nods to these titans of figure skating drama, but they did not all need to be included. Finally, Fargo obviously knows so much about the sport – enough to mention the now-defunct compulsory figures and compulsory dance aspects of figure skating competition – but fails in the category of music rules. It was perhaps a choice of pure artistic license, but it took me out of the story. This story takes place in the 2000s, culminating in 2014, and the characters frequently skate to music with vocals and lyrics – vocals were expressly forbidden in program music until *after* the 2014 Olympics. I was losing my mind. My coworkers are once again contemplating violence.