Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Icebreaker

I’m not one for romance novels, and although this is a fucking spicy-ass book, the romance is the sweetest thing! I squealed more times than I can count, and like it’s not the best written, think YA, but that doesn’t detract from how wonderful the romance is.

It’s cheesy enough, very 00s romcom, that it’s a nice change of pace from how heavy and dark some of what I’ve read this year has been, and the two main characters are so adorable together.

It feels like the warming tipsy feeling you get after a couple of glasses of wine.

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swamprat410's review

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funny lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

TL;DR: Don't expect a beautifully constructed, insightful book that will change your life, and instead, take it for what it is: a light and spicy, contemporary college romance book with the emotional maturity of the 20-somethings it was written about.

Storyline is full of tropes: grumpy girl boss and the sunny hockey captain (the lovable father figure of the found family/ragtag team of unruly hockey players) go from enemies-to-lovers who have to overcome limited resources and learn to share the ice.

I read this book as an audiobook and honestly I wish that I'd had a physical book/ebook to read along with for the sole purpose of annotating/keeping notes to keep the sheer number of characters straight.

This book was like being in a college social circle -- in that there are so many people coming and going and at times you have no idea who is going to stick around/be relevant. There were times where I found myself thinking "why do I care/who the hell is this person?" at some of the anecdotal details, but then again, that's probably what builds the universe that the author is creating.

At times I definitely struggled to get through the story. Anastasia is kind of annoying, there's tons of nicknames (like she has at least 3 I feel like), some of the writing is clunky, and the pacing is weird. Plus there's a lot of stuff that if it happened in real life in your friend group you'd be like uh wtf...

Like if I found out one of my friends was hooking up in an Uber that I was in at the same time as them I'd be pissed. Have some manners girl!! Put some underwear on, knock it off!

But I promised that I would tough it out, and I'm glad I did - Wildfire, the sequel, was much better.

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deemarie25's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

I would like to start with romance is generally not my favorite genre but I have been looking to expand my horizons and needed a light hearted read. This book has been so majorly hyped I decided to give it a try, and I can’t honestly figure out if it’s because it’s not my preferred genre or if I’m really missing something here.

The book was soooooooo long and yet somehow had basically no plot? It’s pretty much 90% spice, 10% other stuff. Another thing that I noticed was there was hardly any descriptive language about settings and characters. It was hard to visualize what the characters looked like, what the places looked and felt like. Not every novel needs to be super descriptive but let me tell you when it came to the spice; descriptive language wasn't lacking there. It was tough to get through, but I didn’t want to DNF because there was a lot of great humor and I liked the MMC and a supporting character.

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