Icebreaker - A.L. Graziadei

 

Printz Award

If I'm being 100% honest, I picked this novel off the list of Printz Award books because I saw the title and thought it was the other young adult romance novel about a hockey player published in 2022 (weird, huh?). Then I saw the cover when I loaded the audiobook. I really liked this book because of how well the characters were written. One of the biggest issues I have with the romance genre, is when characters make stupid decisions in order to be with other person, but it's such a bad decision that it will likely ruin everything anyways. But, I didn't get the sense of that with this novel. It was very reminiscent of Romeo & Juliet, but if they were hockey players instead of teenage aristocrats. I can't say this was my all time favorites, but I also don't really see myself reading a lot of sports romance novels. Overall, I thought it was pretty good.

As far as teenage interests/relevancy. This appeals to a specific group of teens. And the best way I can describe this group is: Creative Writing students. While I don't think there is anything wrong with the book, subject or content wise, I just can't see myself pitching this to a group of teenage boys (guys I promise this book is about hockey!). I could also see some of my previous creative writing students reading this as a group and then this would be the only thing they would talk about in class for the foreseeable future.

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