Hannah Orenstein - Head over Heels

The stakes have never been higher - but is it time to take a leap, and tumble into love?
After training her entire life to make the Olympic gymnastics team, a disastrous performance ended Avery Abrams' athletic career - for good. Seven years on, she's still lost and, reeling from a breakup with her football star boyfriend, returns to her Massachusetts hometown.
In need of a job, Avery agrees to help new coach, Ryan Nicholson, train Hallie, a promising young gymnast with Olympic aspirations, despite her worries about the memories it will evoke.
Back in the gym, she's surprised to find sparks flying with Ryan, and her long-buried love for her sport reemerging as she helps Hallie's talent shine. But when a shocking scandal breaks, it has shattering effects on the world of gymnastics, Avery and everyone around her.
But Avery is not going to let history repeat itself - she's ready to fight for those she loves - and win.

Comment: I got this book in 2020 and what an interesting premise it would be, a story about gymnastics when the Olympics had to be postponed that year... plus, the cute cover made me think sweet romance too.

Avery Abrams is a former gymnastics athlete whose dreams of the Olympics were dashed in 2012 when she gets hurt during the national trials. From then on her life spirals out of the gymnastics world, and the only things she can cope doing is teaching young girls at a gym. Now that her relationship is over, Avery has no other option but to go back home, where everything reminds her of her glory days. Things improve when she goes to an interview to help with Hallie, a very promising young athlete, who has had some issues with her floor routine, the element Avery was better known for when she was competing. It is even better when she learns that Ryan Nicholson, someone she used to see from afar during competitions, and who did win a Olympic medal, is teaching Hallie as well. Will they be a good team teaching such a great student? What about when a scandal in the world of gymnastics starts making headlines everywhere, will Hallie, Avery and Ryan be able to deal with that and keep up their work?

This story takes place in 2020 and I confess I was quite eager to read about how things would happen during a pandemic, but the author states in a introduction note that she chose to write the story as if the pandemic didn't happen and the games weren't postponed one year. Honestly, I was looking for to see precisely this and that felt a little disappoint, in fact. It would have been so much more clever to see how the author would write things if the pandemic had been a part of things.

As for the story we do have, I've started quite curious. I'm not an athlete but like so many other people, I like watching certain events in sport and gymnastics are somehow alluring, I especially love how those girls (and boys) make those things look so simple, as if it's nothing, as if anyone could do them, when the reality is that it's a lifetime practicing and repeating and performing and it has to be physical aspects and mental ones, in order for that to seem smoothly done. Bravo for all athletes!

Well, my hopes of seeing the gymnastics included in the plot were met and I did like how the author made an effort to research proper names and styles and used that information in the story. But that was pretty much where my enjoyment of the story ended. Well, that and Hallie, who is definitely described as a hard working character and I'd have loved to know more about her and her interest in gymnastics. the issue is that, for me, Hallie's character was more a means for an end, and I don't think the author really developed her character beyond the basics.

The focus is, kind of sadly, on Avery. I say this because Avery is the narrator and a very poor one, in my opinion. She was just too sad and depressed in some moments, which I can accept, but her attitude in general didn't warm her up to me and I wasn't that eager to read when I knew I'd be in her "head". I also disliked - but this is my personal preference - that she coped with having to let go of her chance at the 2012 Olympics and of having a different path in life, due to her injury, by going to college and instead of studying or of trying something else, she partied. I prefer when characters who suffer trauma/disappointment/unavoidable issues to deal with that by staying low or moving on with quieter settings, and not by acting out.

Avery had a goal and that ended, and she could nor go back, so i'd have rooted for her more now if she were to see this as a moving forward, but because of how the narrative is told by her, it feels as if she just wanted those feelings back, and that is certainly valid enough, but I thought this would be more uplifting. Then, the author does use the real life situation of the accusations against a doctor who was with the US team and how he abused some athletes as part of the plot. Well, mostly the reference to it, nothing explicit nor directly related to any of the protagonists. Why this theme and not the pandemic one, I kept thinking, and this one was, once more, just like Hallie, a vehicle to address other stuff, and for Avery to think about her experience, not with a doctor, but with a former coach, who never touched anyone but was certainly abusive in other ways.

Apart from this, we also have the inclusion of the romance between Avery and Ryan. I'd not say it was a romantic one... and while this might not have been planned to be a romance first, the content is there, and I did expect more out of it. Avery and Ryan get along but I was never convinced of their feelings nor on how deep they were becoming. It didn't help Avery alone narrates but in this case, the way things were done, I don't think even having his POV would have changed anything. The author's intent just didn't seem to go there with seriousness.

This book has both a yellow and blue covers, depending on the editions, and they are both colorful to the point I did imagine something a bit sweeter. But I think Avery's mind frame was just not well to make this a believable romance or even only a come back type of story. I just could not believe these people were happy in what they were doing! The story has potential, and different options could have made it better, but I was a little frustrated by what was delivered.

Grade: 6/10