Every Reason We Shouldn’t by Sara Fujimura is a charming multicultural romance perfect for the many fans of Jenny Han and Rainbow Rowell. Warning: Contains family expectations, delightful banter, great romantic tension, skating (all kinds!), Korean pastries, and all the feels. Sixteen-year-old figure skater Olivia Kennedy’s Olympic dreams have ended. She’s bitter, but enjoying life as a regular … She’s bitter, but enjoying life as a regular teenager instead of trying to live up to expectations of being the daughter of Olympians Michael Kennedy and Midori Nakashima…until Jonah Choi starts training at her family’s struggling rink.
Jonah’s driven, talented, going for the Olympics in speed skating, completely annoying… and totally gorgeous. Between teasing Jonah, helping her best friend try out for roller derby, figuring out life as a normal teen and keeping the family business running, Olivia’s got her hands full. But will rivalry bring her closer to Jonah, or drive them apart?
“This book is like a warm hug filled with all the things I love. I started smiling from page one and couldn’t put it down.” –Courtney Milan
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Exciting, PG, multicultural, YA, sports romance
Olivia Kennedy is the almost-sixteen, biracial daughter of a Japanese-American mother and Euro-American father who are world famous for winning Olympic gold as a fabulously talented figure-skating team. Olivia had figure-skating, Olympic dreams as well, and trained since early childhood toward that lofty goal, until a humiliating failure at a major competition the previous year convinced her that her Olympic potential is gone. Since then, she has concentrated on life as a “normal” teenager in Phoenix, Arizona. She has been attending school for the first time, after years of home schooling due to her hectic skating schedule. And she has contributed a great deal to the increasingly dicey proposition of keeping her parents’ ice-skating rink afloat. The rink is struggling mainly because her father is constantly on the road trying to earn a living as a professional, performing, Ice Capades type skater, and her mother can work very little due to suffering constant debilitating pain from a back injury sustained a few years ago when her father dropped her during a performance. Besides Olivia’s efforts, significant help with the rink is also provided by its sole, non-family employee who helps manage the rink, Olivia’s closest friend, Mack, a twenty-year-old single mother with a baby and aspirations to win a spot on a local, women’s, roller derby team.
When almost-sixteen Jonah Choi, a Korean-American, Olympic-caliber, speed skater, begins training regularly at Olivia’s family’s rink, his fees are a tremendous boon to the bottom line of the rink. In addition, their budding romantic relationship has a profound, positive effect on the two of them, both personally and in their ongoing growth and development as super-star skaters.
I’m a big fan of well-written, young-adult, sports romances, particularly when both of the romantic protagonists are massively talented athletes, and especially when they engage in the same sport—or very close to it—as is the case for Jonah and Olivia, who are both masterful ice skaters.
In addition to the central romance plot, there are many fun scenes with both Olivia and Jonah on stage when he is training as a speed skater and solicits tips and tricks from her as a figure skater that could help him avoid catastrophic falls while racing. There are also many entertaining scenes between Mack and Olivia, as well as scenes showing Olivia’s relationship with her mother and one-on-one scenes with her father. There are also crucial scenes with Olivia’s former figure-skating partner, Egg, who at age eighteen is a few years older than Olivia.
I greatly appreciated that every character in this novel, both the main two protagonists and the above subcharacters, all have significant grown arcs. Jonah and Olivia have the ideal kind of romance, in my estimation, in that they stimulate each other to become better people, both personally and as athletes. Olivia’s mother has important decisions to make about treatment options for her chronic pain, and her father has issues to deal with surrounding keeping the family financially afloat. The author sympathetically portrays Mack’s struggles as a single mother, as someone attempting to improve her ice-skating skills in order to win a spot on the local roller derby team, and as a new adult hoping to find a career that fits her natural interests and talents.
This book has a satisfying, “happy for now” type of HEA, and all plot threads are tied up with no crucial questions left unanswered.
I would rate this book PG in the sense that Olivia and Jonah have intense sexual and emotional chemistry with each other, and as a natural outgrowth of that, they have several passionate make-out sessions over the course of the novel. Other than that, the book is mostly G-rated in that there are no drugs, underage drinking, or wild parties. It is a refreshing change for YA novels that Jonah, especially, and Olivia to a lesser degree, both eat a healthy diet and, while in training, avoid junk food of all kinds, especially sugar.
My one objection to this book is that the author has not done her homework on treatment options for excruciating chronic pain such that which Olivia’s mother endures. Further, the author has a poor understanding of how health insurance coverage works in the USA. It seems to be a typical failing of American authors of popular fiction in general that they tend to present in their stories one of two equally inaccurate, opposite extremes about healthcare costs: either they presume that all healthcare is free in the USA (which it decidedly is not), or they presume that all healthcare is paid entirely out of pocket (which also is not true). In the case of Olivia’s family, their money problems are a central source of conflict for Olivia in the novel, and they are attributed for the most part to the ever mounting, unpaid medical bills of Olivia’s mother. However, as a family that is poor enough that Olivia qualifies for the free lunch program at the public school she attends, her family would simultaneously qualify for free health insurance coverage under Medicaid in Arizona, which has been greatly expanded via massive federal subsidies since 2013. Which means that, in actuality, Olivia’s family would have no logical reason to be enormously in debt for Olivia’s mother’s ongoing medical expenses.
In addition, there is another irritating medical inaccuracy springing off of the above misconception that Olivia’s mother is presumed to have no health insurance. Other than for emergency surgery to keep a patient from dying, doctors and hospitals in this country, for decades now, have refused to allow patients to run up medical debts. They flatly refuse to treat patients without insurance unless they pay cash directly to their billing staff before the doctor will see them, or the hospital will treat them. And if patients have insurance, before the doctor will see them or they can have surgery at a hospital, the billing staff will call their insurance company, find out what it will pay for the proposed medical care, and insist that the patient pay the difference before receiving treatment. In addition, no doctor or physical therapist deals with the money side of things. They leave that entirely to the billing staff. For that reason, as well as patient privacy laws, a PT would never, ever yell across a waiting room, threatening a patient that she’d better get her bill paid soon if she wants any more treatment, as Olivia’s mother’s PT does in this book.
Finally, on the irritating medical mistakes front: it is highly improbable that, in a city the size of Phoenix, both Olivia’s mother and Jonah would show up at the same time at the same PT’s office for treatment.
Other than these healthcare inaccuracies, though, the author’s research on the central focus of the story, ice skating, including figure skating, speed skating, and roller derby skating, seems accurate, realistic, and is compellingly written.
I rate this book as follows:
Heroine: 4 stars
Hero: 5 stars
Subcharacters: 4 stars
Romance Plot: 4 stars
Skating Plot: 4 stars
Family Medical Drama Plot: 2 stars
Writing: 4 stars
Overall: 3.8 rounded to 4 stars
I haven’t loved a book like I loved this one in a very long time. And I DNF a lot of books because I can be pretty picky.
This one is about the daughter of former olympic figure skating champions who have fallen on hard times. Her mom sustained a debilitating injury that keeps her on painkillers most days. Her dad is on tour with something like Ice Capades. This leads heroine Olivia to run their failing ice rink by herself after her own skating dreams were crushed by a disqualifying (and epically bad) performance at her last competition.
Now viewed as a failure in the skating world at the tender age of sixteen, her private lesson clients have even stopped coming. A new-to-town Olympic hopeful speed skater named Jonah may be her family’s only hope. Renting out their rink for training gives her family the income it sorely needs. It also creates the perfect circumstances for two elite young athletes to feel like normal teenagers, and to fall in love.
What I loved about this book was the impeccable balance between grittiness and puppy love. It showed vividly what it’s like to grow up in a family that’s struggling financially and also what it’s like to grow up in a family in which the parents can’t be fully present for their kids. By contrast, it showed other, indelible, innocent pieces of youth (e.g., stealing kisses, making mixtapes, going to dances). Both the hero and heroine were mature beyond their years from having to train so hard. And yet, they were both still kids. I loved every minute of this book and was sad to see it end. I would definitely read other books by Sara Fujimura.
This was a sweet romance that dealt with so many things, one of which was living in the shadow of parents who were Olympic figure skating pairs’ champions. Olivia was one of the best junior pairs’ skater when everything seemingly fell apart with one disastrous performance. Working in the skating rink owned by her Gold-medal winning parents, Olivia has the drive to skate again simmering beneath the surface. She shouldn’t be washed up at 16, right? But then Jonah comes along, a driven short-track speed skater with an equally driven father and coach. Each one of them have things to teach the other. Can Olivia rekindle her dream to skate again? And if not as a pairs skater, maybe as a singles skater? The book deals with so many things like family dynamics, peer pressure, teen love and fierce competitiveness of young athletes. I enjoyed it immensely and was sort of left hanging at the end. I’m assuming there’s a book two? I hope…
Whether your first ice skating romance was The Cutting Edge or Yuri!!! On Ice, you will absolutely love this book. Full of complicated family relationships, sparkling friendships, and a completely delicious romance, Every Reason We Shouldn’t is an uplifting love song to everyone who’s ever lost their way, and then had the courage to find it again.
I love sweet YA full of romance, hearts, bonds and lots of love. Every Reason We Shouldn’t bring that and a dose of drama, but unlike most, it’s not just youthful or loving dramas.
Olivia and Jonah are just perfect together, they help each other to find their balance point and are not afraid to demonstrate what they feel for each other, in addition they bring the anxieties of competitions and demands from parents and in Olivia’s case the lack their support.
I loved every romantic moment, I loved their friends mainly Mack. She brings a lot of humor and dynamics to the plot and I swear I want a book for her.
The only detail that made me a little sad was that I expected a better resolution for the story of Olivia and Egg because for me what happened between them was very serious.
I loved the Asian representation in this book. Very nicely woven themes and developed characters and a very clean teen romance that I enjoyed very much! I love the dialogue and banter and the situations are very relatable. Fujimura wrote a beautiful story about these two teens and their struggles in figure skating world. It seems that research was done very well as the author was not a skater in the past. I had some issues as a person in the medical field about the issues there. However, they are minor and did not distract from the overall story line which i enjoyed very much! I would recommend this book to my young readers.
3.5 Stars
EVERY REASON WE SHOULDN’T is a story about a girl who crashed and burned in her last ice skating couples’ competition and is figuring out what her life should look like. It’s about a talented speed skater who begins training at her rink and the possibility of romance. It’s about friendship and family, but mostly about second chances and finding the nerve to save something important. Recommended to contemporary YA fans, especially those who enjoy stories about athletes.
Olivia was a great character from the start! She was easy to connect with and cheer on as she tried to figure out who she was and if she was really washed up or if she had more in her. She also brought all the feels as she dealt with a tough family situation, competing for herself, and finding first love. Jonah was adorable and inspiring. He had talent and a good work ethic while also trying to figure out what “normal” looked like. Mack was this crazy mix of young mother, responsible employee, surrogate mom, and wild woman with her roller derby aspirations. It was a bit of a mess, honestly, as Olivia and Jonah got to know each other. At one point I actually didn’t like Jonah for Olivia and was even upset at Mack… but it all worked out. Then there was the fun and crazy group of school friends and both Olivia’s and Jonah’s families with all their own issues and drama, that added to the story.
There was a lot of romance in this story (some of it swoon-worthy), but what I really liked was that it was about so much more than that. It was about Olivia finding her inner strength to push through pain, to give it her all, and to believe in herself when no one else would. It was also about an ice skating rink that was its own home for the family it brought together of owners, employees, serious skaters, and those who skated for fun. It was also about dreams and sometimes letting go.
There were a couple of things that didn’t work for me or needed a bit more development. I wasn’t quite sure about a couple 15-year-olds hanging out with some college-aged friends. Some parts didn’t always feel realistic and felt over dramatized. I think some things would have worked better for me if some of the characters would have been older and maybe if some of them weren’t always competing against each other.
In the end, was it what I wished for? I enjoyed reading this story. It was entertaining with some serious feels in places, and characters who I could cheer on. I’m curious to see where book two will lead.
Content: Some swearing (including the s-word), some innuendo and heavy making out.
Source: I received a complimentary copy from the publisher through the Fantastic Flying Book Club, which did not require a positive review. All opinions are my own.