Review: "It's a Love/Skate Relationship" by Carli J. Corson

It's a Love/Skate Relationship by Carli J. Corson
Published January 2025 via HarperTeen
★★★★

The dream: to dominate on the ice. And as a rising ice hockey star, Charlie has every reason to think that she'll be able to do just that. The wrench: an accidental off-ice brawl scuppers her plans for the season, her chance to be seen by scouts, and her practice time. The solution: stay on the ice by standing in as an elite pairs skater's partner for a few months. And the second wrench: they can't stand each other.

I have a thing for ice skating books (also gymnastics—see Sports for Which I Do Not Have the Coordination, and also Sports for Which I Do Not Have the Pain Tolerance), which made this feel like an obvious pick. Charlie's first love is hockey, but she's willing and able to transfer some of that passion to pairs skating, because at the end of the day she loves being on the ice.

The characters are a lot of fun here. Charlie's a teenager, and she acts like it; she has her moments of maturity, but also her moments of, you know, sticking her tongue out and gloating, or making rash choices. It's on the tip of my tongue to explain to Dad what I learned in bio the other day—how my brain's frontal lobe isn't fully developed, which is why teenagers make risky decisions. But he won't really accept that as reasoning, so I hang my head instead. (loc. 2772*) There's an element of The Outsiders at times (though Charlie would belong to the Socs, not the Greasers), and of Ice Angel (sort of), but there's also a lot of playfulness.

What I'm less certain about is the realism factor. When Charlie picks up pairs skating, it's without any experience in figure skating, but she leaps in at a very high level and exceeds expectations almost immediately. She works hard, but I have to conclude that she has some sort of preternatural ability if she's able to jump in like this. I enjoyed the book enough that I was generally rooting for Charlie to do unnaturally well anyway, but I think I would have found it more realistic if she had had some level of background in figure skating (say, as a kid before her parents/father wised up and put her in hockey instead?) and/or if she'd been called on to train for regionals rather than sectionals (to say nothing of later competitions in the book).

3.5 stars; lots of fun; don't assume from this that you'll soon be seeing your favorite ice hockey stars on the Olympic ice without their teams and their pucks and their padding.

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

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.