From the pomp of Opening Ceremonies to the good-byes of Closing Ceremonies, join three remarkable women during the Winter Olympics. Tessa Rutledge, once an Olympic champion figure skater, returns as a coach, encountering her first love – and heartbreak – and testing her ability to forgive. Alpine skier Kyle Armstrong has made a mistake that could cost her Olympic gold and any hope of reconciling with the man she loves. Biathlete Rikki Lodge is just happy to be at the Games, until she meets a hockey player who demands that she puts everything on the line.
Let The Games begin!
Comment: If I remember correctly, I got interested in this book while searching for books with the sports theme, but not the traditional ones we tend to find more often in romance. This book is even set during the Winter Olympic games, thus, even better!
It's the Olympic games and all athletes are looking for to do their best, or at least enjoy the experience. With this in mind, the organization even decided to to go a step further and place athletes from different modalities in the same complex apartments, which will be turned into homes when the games are over. This is how Tessa Rutlege, a former skater who is now coaching young Amy, is there, along with alpine skiers Nan Monahan and Kyle Armstrong, who is hiding a secret, and bi-athlete Rikki Lodge who at 31 is looking to having a good time, but perhaps she only needs someone to believe in her... will all these athletes be able to reach their best potential at these games while dealing with a different type of housing and away from those who better know what is on their minds?
The premise for this book is, indeed, unlikely. Athletes in professional competitions have to follow many rules, even if only for organizational aspects, and living with people out of their sphere for the sake of an experience when something so important is on the line seems very, very difficult to accept. till, for a fictional story, it does offer a great counterpart: seeing the interactions of people with common ground but with different techniques and training.
To be honest, I don't know much about the sports in the Winter games... I'm at a country that has no real expression in winter sports, and from the top of my head I can only probably think of figure skating. From this angle, reading this book was refreshing, for I have learned something and I have become more interested in what some sports entail... it does give a whole new perspective to see the publicity to some sports on the sports channels I have when I'm watching other things, like cycling.
Anyway, this book is an interesting take on sports and on the Olympic games, but it's also mainly a romance novel centered on three main characters, Tessa, Rikki and Kyle. All the other characters, including their love interests who, here and there, have sections form their POVs, are secondary and a different take on the living conditions is to see if these girls would become friends. In a way, they do but I will confess things turned too quickly into "BFFs forever" it seems, due to a specific event. I want to think the story would still include their friendship developing with this cohabitation, but perhaps not in such a quick way.
The three main characters are at different stages in their professional lives. Tessa is now a coach but she is a former medalist who fell in love with a Russian athlete but nothing happened when it seemed they could become a couple, which left her feeling bittersweet. Of course now it's the opportunity to finally reconnect, and they do, but as it often happens with the "lovers reunited", I've found this romance to be a little boring, always a recollection to past things in their heads...I'd say their romance ends up in the HFN category.
Rikki is 31, almost done with her Olympic career, and she feels she is doing what she can but this time she ends up being challenged by a ice hockey player. They quickly become a couple and Rikki learns a lesson when they have a fight and he tells her some things she should have heard before.. this was a better romance to my personal preference, but the progress is too quick. I can understand, since my physical copy doesn't even reach 300 pages, but a lot could have been better.
Kyle and her friend Nan are alpine athletes and Kyle is seen as a great promise. The problem is that she has a secret she wants to keep that way, especially from one of the coaches, Rob, with whom she fell in love. She knows things between them cannot happen while there's this professional block, but she is facing a problem that will be the catalyst to everyone in their group to strengthen their bonds. I liked Kyle but she read as somewhat superficial. I liked Nan more, but she was only a secondary character who became the glue between them all as things went towards the end.
The writing style is very practical, no real flourishes, but has some introspective monologues/thoughts. It does feel the story was a bit stilted because of this style, and the progress wasn't as emotional as I expected. I think things were rushed so that it could match the period of the time the Olympics usually take and the plot and the characterization did suffer due to this. Perhaps more books or simply ore pages to develop everyone more!
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