A review by sk_m
Sweat by Jonah Yorke

4.5

REVIEW: ⟫ There is very little about this story that makes it seem like a debut novel – I am extremely impressed with this. 

Tommy doesn’t have the best life – his sister is struggling from cancer, his Mother is stoic and blunt, and college isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And don’t even get him started on his long-term girlfriend who has cheated on him – again! But this time she’s cheated with someone Tommy knows – and hates.

Rowan honestly broke my heart. I thought all of my sympathies would be with Tommy, but the more into the book I got, the more I just wanted to give Rowan a huge hug and tell him that he wasn’t alone. He felt his only worth was in how he played soccer – finding love wasn’t on the cards for him. 

Until Tommy barrels back into his life with a punch, somehow pushing all of Rowan’s buttons and making him face things about himself that he had managed to keep relatively pushed down. Perhaps the story could have been edited to be a bit shorter – we get a lot of training and football, and for a little while I wondered where the story was going. The relationship between Tommy and Rowan was actually really beautiful – the way that their broken edges fit together so well, how they grew to understand each other – was masterfully handled. There was a scene after a soccer match where I literally gasped out loud and clutched my pearls, terrified for what it meant for our boys. 

The angst was handled so well – Erica deserves a special mention for making the decision to handle things on her own terms – and the characters were all ‘real’ people. There were no caricatures, obvious ‘bad’ guys or anything like that. The team mates were funny, entertaining and ultimately supportive and I enjoyed the banter and felt it was realistic. I will definitely keep an eye out for the next book in the series and am so pleased that I picked this up. 

I received an ARC from BookSirens.