A review by officialashleyo
The Favorites by Layne Fargo

dark emotional tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Far and away the most entertaining and easy read I've had this year!

I really enjoyed the bounce back and forth between Kat's POV and the documentary clips from the cast of characters we don't have time to consistently hear from throughout the rest of the novel - this narrative style really suited the story and all the drama. About halfway through the book, I kept thinking about how fun of a film adaptation this would make. It was fast-paced, there were plenty of villains to keep you on edge, and Fargo laid the tension and drama on thick for the majority of the book. I definitely see this appealing to fans of I, Tonya, or fans of high stakes reality TV/sports docuseries.

As fun as the book was, there were some aspects that lightly nagged at me throughout. For one: I personally hate miscommunication tropes as a plot device, and this just came up a few too many times for my taste. There's of course the broader motif of Shaw and Rocha simply not sitting down to properly verbalize their respective hopes and dreams, especially early on when they fled their hometown and joined the Lin Academy. On its own, I could have brushed it off as a factor of them being young and lacking proper adult perspective as they decided to formally pursue a skating career. 

But in addition to that broader pain point, there were also two (or more?) distinct scenes as Shaw and Rocha's partnership began to crumble that were fueled on purely by Heath overhearing very non-private conversations where Kat decided to vent her frustrations about him to a third party. Once was fine, but multiple instances felt a little lazy.

I also felt like the character-fueled momentum of the story quickly fell off when the main quartet reconnected in Part V. While I do think the same petty in-fighting and hormone-driven conflicts were played out by this point in their relationships, the story did start to lose a little steam, making some of the already predictable plot twists stand out more sharply to me than they would have in the earlier parts of the book. With the way everyone seemed to have checked their egos and reined in their bullshit, you'd think a decade had passed since the series of embarrassments at the 2010 Olympics. Suddenly I felt like I was reading about completely different characters, but I also felt pretty unsurprised by a lot of what happened to them in the proceeding chapters. What really got to me was how obvious it was that
something was up with the pills Shaw and Rocha were taking. In addition, it was pretty clear that something or another was going to come up to either prevent them from getting the gold, or rip it away from them after.
 

And yet, somehow we end the novel seeing them in this seemingly happy, healthy little
polycule of sorts
finding their own ways to heal and stay involved in the sport they've loved their whole lives. It was sweet, but felt a little too...easy? I'm nowhere close to being a pro athlete myself, so who am I to say how realistic this is? But all the trauma they endured was bound to keep them in each other's orbit for life, in one way or another, for better or worse. This was one long, messy car wreck I could not take take my eyes off of.

All critiques aside, it really was super fun and I would genuinely recommend it to someone looking for something dramatic and engaging to read.
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