In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.

Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.

So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.

Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.

When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.

Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.

The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.

Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.

Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.

We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.

But that was choreography. This was real.

I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.