REVIEW: Ice Breaker by Hannah Grace

“Don’t give me that shit. I’ve seen what you have on your smutty bookshelf.” - Hannah Grace

Stassie and Nate are both ambitious athletes at Maple Hills University (or College or whatever). Through an unfortunate prank, they now only have one ice rink, meaning that Nate and his hockey team have to share "ice time" with Stassie and other figure skaters. This causes drama. For, honestly speaking, no reason at all.

I am so incredibly mad. I hated, hated, HATED this.

The two stars on my goodreads are for the arguably strong start. I loved Anastasia's and Nate's first spice scenes - They were hot, end of story. I also liked how openly sexual she was. Usually, books slut-shame or write something along the lines of "I love girls who have a lot of sex, great for them, queens, but I am just not that type of person" blahblahblah. It felt good to read something about a woman in her early twenties being horny and not ashamed of living it out. There, I said it!

But it all went downhill from there.

First of all: Where was the fucking storyline? Plot-what-plot? The "hatred" between Nate and Stassie was completely forced. Ridiculous as hell! Also, everyone constantly telling the other half of the pair how great the other person is. Everyone telling Stassie what a good guy Nathan is, all of the boys immediately loving her, threatening to steal her from Nathan because she's so great and everyone just loves her - The cringe was insane and I say this as someone who grew up with wattpad, ffs!

I even started to cringe at the spice scenes (believe my horny ass or not). I love it when books don't cut out that part of relationships, but only if it makes sense. It was so hot to finally read the tension between them snap for the first few times. After that, the sex scenes just became repetitive and pointless. We get it, Nate's good in bed. What now?

The whole book got downhill from the point they got together. There was no storyline whatsoever. It was obvious from the start that both of them were such green flags, it was obvious from the start that Aaron was the bad guy... The two last thirds of the book were just Nate and Stassie telling each other and themselves and them constantly getting told by others how great they are, how proud of each other, how hot... YIKES! When she broke into the ice on that lake... What was that about? Like what? It had no point at all. The author just knew she was writing a terribly boring book and that's why she went "okay, gonna need him to call her a good girl during sex again" and "Imma almost kill her for no reason and with no point and, yeah, not really mention it again" every two chapters.

I thought in the end it was gonna get a bit better again with the whole "dealing with Aaron as a partner" thing because it was an interesting situation of her fixing a professional relationship while keeping her distance personally. It was also the only time when Nate was portrayed as a human being, compared to just being "the perfect guy". I liked his jealousy, his selfishness because it made him real. I also thought it was reasonable that Stassie couldn't drop Aaron for career reasons and I liked that the situation was a conflict for Nate and that it showed that, in real life, you need to learn to work with the situations you got and that, even with therapy, you cannot make everything good, some things are just shitty. I thought: Good, at least something better towards the ending. But no. :)

Aaron kisses her, Nate punches him, Stassie realises out of the blue that she could go solo and goes on to win gold though she's never skated in an international competition before and Nate proposes. Sure thing. Perfect love story. This is an insult to... Basically everything, to be honest.

I hated reading this. I hated more that it had potential and disappointed me so badly after I thought I'd found something cool. JJ was the only bearable part towards the end, really. Don't read. Also, who the fuck does that shit in an uber while not alone? Like, what?

I'm currently reading the second part of the series, Wildfire, and every time anyone mentions Stassie or Nate, I want to punch something; that's how angry I am.