Book Review: Icebreaker (Maple Hills #1)

by Hannah Grace

Rating: ⭐2/5⭐

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Review

This has got to be one of the most boring books I’ve read this year, if not the most boring one. Even the Cutting Edge Disney movies have better, more compelling plots than this book had.

But worse than that, I feel bamboozled. Based on the description, I thought the main focus of the story would have been Stassie and Nate skating together, spending lots of time with each other on the ice and bonding over shared experiences, even if they both competed in different sports. That was not the case. The book was 75% sex and party scenes, and 25% skating and other stuff. There was no meat to the plot, it was all superficial and uninteresting everyday occurrences. Icebreaker should have been 300 pages at most.

And the way the whole thing was written didn’t help in the slightest. The book was written in present tense, but there were verbs conjugated wrong sprinkled throughout and instances of improperly used english, such as confusing close-up (meaning zoom in) with up-close (which means closer). I still can’t quite put my finger on what specifically was so off-putting and distracting about the prose used, but I think it was some type of combination of weird punctuation, forced dialogues and sloppy writing.

“Heat spreads through my body when she shudders because I love how she reacts to me.”

Honestly, the development of the relationship between Anastasia and Nathan was also plain awful. It felt rushed and was all over the place. She really had a serious Jekyll/Hyde thing going on during their first true interaction. She went from wary, to friendly and flirty, to irrationally angry in the span of a couple of pages. Her behavior came across as erratic and inconsistent.

I was hoping we’d be presented with some sort of explanation for her extreme mood swing as the story unfolded. For example, some deep-seated trauma related to people lying to her—or anything, really—to give some context to what came across as an irrational overreaction, but none was provided.

It would have been so much more justifiable if she’d been pissed at him from the beginning, choosing him—as the hockey team captain—to aim her anger and frustrations at, about having to share her much needed ice time with the hockey team. Then, we could have gotten a close proximity, true enemies-to-lovers, and not whatever excuse of a mess this ended up being.

Also, I feel like there was, potentially, a much more interesting story to be told about an ice-skating pair with a slightly toxic relationship born out of each of them having serious emotional baggage.

Picture this: a bad accident happens, that not only triggers a trauma response on the girl—making her afraid of being lifted or skating altogether—but also fractures her relationship with her partner, over the loss of trust and the airing out of previously bottled up grievances. Then, we could’ve seen their individual journeys of learning to cope with the dark parts of themselves, healing and growing, to come back together better and stronger.

I feel like that would have been a much more meaningful and emotionally impactful story. The path to healing a mutually destructive relationship. Going from “we bring out the worst in each other” to “we bring out the best in each other” would have made for a better book.

Instead, we got two kids who liked each other from pretty much the very beginning, fell in love and achieved all their dreams. The end. It was all so bland and boring.

The sole bright spot amidst all the drabness, was Henry. I loved his blunt comments and sweet personality. But given how much I disliked Hannah Grace’s approach to telling stories, I don’t think I’ll be coming back to her books for the time being.

Truly, if you are a fan of college hockey romances, and have somehow been living under a rock and not heard about Elle Kennedy, go check out her books. They’re considerably better.

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What should I read next?