Icebreaker – Hannah Grace

#Bookstagram made me do it! I’ve been scrolling past fellow fans of spicy reads raving about Icebreaker for nearly two years now, and they wore me down. I’m finally giving this college sports romance a go!

Icebreaker has all the hallmarks of a #BookTokSensation novel. There’s the cutesy cartoon cover that belies the spiciness of the content, the shameless marketing of the trope contained therein (“frenemies-to-lovers”, as one of the characters actually describes it in the narrative), and a helpful playlist of Vibe-appropriate songs in the front. It’s sold over a million copies worldwide, so the formula clearly works!

The story is told through chapters alternating the points of view of the romantic leads. Anastasia is a figure skater at the University of California, Maple Hills, with her sights set on an Olympic medal with her skating partner Aaron. But he’s not the hero of this story: that would be Nathan, a hockey player headed for the NHL after graduation. They’re thrown together when a college prank goes wrong and puts the hockey training rink out of action for a season. Figure skaters and hockey players collide, and sparks fly.

Anastasia and Nathan have a series of antagonistic-but-sexually-charged encounters, before finally consummating their situation at a rowdy party (romantic, eh?). Anastasia is mortified by her lack of self-control, and tries her best to avoid Nathan, but naturally the plot keeps throwing them together. Her skating partner becomes increasingly jealous, and when he gets injured off the ice, he blames Nathan. Nathan is innocent, but cops the blame anyway to stop it being directed elsewhere.

Icebreaker gets a bit convoluted from here, but it boils down to Nathan offering to fill in for Aaron as Anastasia’s skating partner until his injury heals, and their relationship develops in leaps and bounds as Anastasia realises that her partnership with Aaron isn’t as healthy as she once thought.

My fellow #Bookstagrammers weren’t lying: the spice in Icebreaker is excellent. Grace includes only the bare minimum of ice skating and hockey talk, basically using the sports simply to pad out the sex and the lovey-dovey bits. I was very grateful to Grace for avoiding the sports info-dump, and focusing instead on the A+ banter and tension.

I did have some trouble keeping all of the hockey players on Nathan’s team straight. There seems to be a lot of them (granted, I don’t know how many players are actually supposed to be on a hockey team, so maybe that’s normal?). Henry was an absolute gem, my favourite side character, so he stood out, but the rest of them blurred into one at times. I was particularly frustrated by the choice to have a character named Robbie and a separate character named Bobby – that just seems needlessly confusing.

Speaking of Robbie: Icebreaker has possibly the best representation of a wheelchair user that I’ve seen in contemporary fiction. Robbie is a full and contributing part of the team as assistant coach, and his team loves and respects him rather than treating him like a mascot or an object of pity. His spinal cord injury is explained without being turned into a tragic back-story or used as fuel for a main character’s development. He is a well-rounded character, a love interest in his own right(! which is all too rare for characters who live with a disability), and his use of mobility aids and specific accessibility needs are simply a fact of his life. Honestly, my hat goes off to Grace – even if the spice hadn’t been on point in Icebreaker, I’d be singing her praises for Robbie’s depiction alone.

It wouldn’t be a #BookTokSensation novel if it didn’t at least nudge some potentially-triggering topics, so here’s a content warning for disordered eating. Also, if you like to see manipulative man-boys get their comeuppance, you might need to temper your expectations, because Aaron gets off pretty lightly after a prolonged campaign of gaslighting, coercive control, and narcissism.

Overall, Icebreaker is a completely unrealistic wish-fulfillment spicy romance novel, and I won’t have anyone disparage it on those grounds. It does exactly what it does on the tin, and it does it well. It’s a delightful, satisfying read – one million #Bookstagrammers can’t be wrong!

My favourite Amazon reviews of Icebreaker:

• “i genuinely think the one direction fanfic i wrote when i was 13 was better than this. and my fanfic involved me driving off a cliff and coming back as a ghost to haunt niall” – jhanvi
• “It was okay but literally threes no plot it’s just intercourse.” – Good👍
• “I have no words, I am baffled at how far human literature has sunken to this abhorrence of the english language. I can sit through a lot, and I mean a lot, and if put me in a room with this book and locked me in, I would commit heinous crimes.” – lily n