Review: "Olympic Enemies" by Rebecca J. Caffery

Olympic Enemies by Rebecca J. Caffery
Released 6 February 2023 via The Wild Rose Press
★★★

Oliver and Lucas don't get along—they never have. Lucas has a chip on his shoulder the size of Wales and resents the fact that his gymnastics teammates haven't had to do as much as he has to get by; Oliver, as team captain, resents the fact that Lucas doesn't want to be best mates with the rest of the team.

I'm no gymnastics expert: I took a gymnastics class as a kid and was fast-tracked into the "you are too incompetent to ever turn a cartwheel" group (literally, they taught us "modified cartwheels" because they didn't think we had the talent for anything more complex), and that was the end of my gymnastics career. But I have a soft spot for gymnastics books, and it's rare to find one about men's gymnastics. The difference is fascinating to me for a couple of reasons, starting with that gymnastics is a rare sport in which women get more attention than men...but also because male gymnasts, who are usually older than female gymnasts, often get a very different training approach—they're allowed to have things like friends, and opinions, and maybe even occasional carbs. (They have some sport-specific similarities, too, like small stature—successful gymnasts tend to be on the short side because being short makes rotating midair easier. Something to do with center of gravity and other physics-related things!)

So here we have a book about two male gymnasts (plus their teammates), complete with pommel horse and rings. It will resonate well with fans of enemies-to-lovers books, I think; there's a great deal of screaming at each other and smoldering gazes before they get on with the boinking. For people more interested in gymnastics, though, I'd probably take a pass—it was hard to believe that these Olympic athletes in a body-focused sport were, well, Olympic athletes in a body-focused sport. A bit too much gorging on fast food, getting drunk as a skunk just days before competition, and the coach(!) covering for Oliver and Lucas when they bailed on practice(!), at least for my tastes. This is a book in which the heroes are tall and strapping, as befits a romance novel, but not necessarily as befits a book about gymnasts. My priority is the characters flipping through the air, but if your priority is the characters flipping out, flipping each other off, and then flipping naked into bed, this might be a better fit for you.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.