Blurb: A patch of black ice is all it takes for Ryan “Preach” Armstrong’s perfectly planned future to skid out of control. The car crash shatters his hockey dreams…and injures Woodhaven’s newest student, Grace Milner. As much as this feisty track phenom gets under Preach’s skin in all the best and worst ways, she might just be his path to redemption…
Grace can’t believe that all it took was seriously bad timing and a hot but prickly hockey player to threaten her lifelong dream of joining the Air Force. Now, instead of prepping for the track season and upcoming start of basic training, she has to complete community service with the absolute last person she would ever want to be stuck with—the guy who shattered her future.
When two fierce competitors collide this hard, the only result is heartbreak…or an epic victory as they cross the finish line together.
Purchase Link:
Amazon
After having adored last year’s In the Penalty Box by Lynn Rush and Kelly Anne Blount, I was looking forward to their next book together, Crossing the Line. Unfortunately repetition and sometimes misplaced angst kept me from loving it.
Grace Millner has had her future planned out since she was a little kid. She would enlist in the Air Force straight after high school and become a pararescue specialist. Ryan aka Preach also has his future planned: hockey, hockey, hockey. But on one fateful night the course of their future is changed, forcing them to self-examine and adapt.
Crossing the Line is well-written and the plot is interesting but the characters never really intrigued me and there wasn’t much sports action. Due to a lot of repetition in which the accident at the beginning of the novel is rehashed with a lot of “woe is me” on Grace’s part, I grew bored. That said, Crossing the Line is admittedly a novel for the younger set who would appreciate the angst and self-pity far more than I did. I never felt that Grace grew as a character. She was far too dependent on other characters needing to tell her some truths, when she should have done some soul-searching to find her own. Preach was a decent guy who turned himself around after a couple of miscues.
A good read for young adults but perhaps not a good choice for all readers.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
