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natalie_wyatt 's review for:
Rink Rash
by Santana Knox
Received as an ARC.
🛼 Sapphic romance
🛼 Rivals to lovers
🛼 Found family
🛼 She cooks for her
🛼 Roller derby
Santana Knox, you monster. You literary goddess. You absolute menace. I picked up Rink Rash expecting a spicy little sapphic roller derby romance and instead got emotionally eviscerated. I am unwell. This book has chewed me up, spit me out, and run me over with a pair of skates…and I liked it. No. I loved it. I devoured it like I was starved for pain and character trauma. Because apparently, I am.
Let’s talk about Vera Havik, because holy self-destructive, swaggering chaos. She is rage and heartbreak wrapped in fishnets and sarcasm, and I wanted to scream every time she entered the scene. The woman is a car crash in slow motion: messy, beautiful, impossible to look away from. And Madeline Maddox? Ice queen with a cracked core, roller derby captain, emotionally constipated in the most delicious way. Their dynamic is the exact kind of “I hate you, I want you, I cannot survive this” energy I crave like oxygen.
Their chemistry is nuclear. It’s so tense I felt like my Kindle might actually combust. Santana writes intimacy like it’s violence, soft touches feel like punches, and when these two finally give in? I ascended. I left my body. I transcended into another plane where nothing exists but bruises, longing, and derby sweat. And somehow, somehow, it’s still tender. Still real. Still absolutely, gut wrenchingly human.
And the writing? It’s poetry dipped in gasoline. The dialogue cuts. The inner monologues hurt. Every scene feels like it’s daring you to look away, and you can’t. You won’t. You’ll be glued to the page with your soul in your throat and your heart clenched in your hands.
This isn’t just a love story. It’s a survival story. It’s grief and healing and shame and lust and anger, all tangled up in wheels and fishnets and glitter smeared pain. It’s about two broken women crashing into each other over and over again until something shifts. Until the breaking becomes becoming.
Rink Rash is everything. It’s brutal and gorgeous and feral and tender. If you’re not emotionally wrecked by the final chapter, you didn’t read it right. I’ll be recovering from this one for the rest of my life. Five stars. A thousand bruises. No regrets.