A couple years ago I read Lynn Painter’s YA novel The Do-Over and I really enjoyed it. I bought Fake Skating on a whim but, sadly, I didn’t have the same reading experience this time around.
Dani’s an army brat and has never lived anywhere for more than a couple of years, but now her parents are getting a divorce so she and her mom have moved back Southview, a small town in Minnesota where her mother, Hannah, grew up.
Alec and Dani were childhood besties. They really only saw each other once a year when Dani’s mother, Hannah, brought her back to Southview to visit her grandparents and best friend Sarah, Alec’s mom. For that month they were inseparable, but it’s been five years since they’ve seen each other or communicated in any way and both of these teens have feelings about that.
Neither Alec or Dani are the 12-year-olds they once were. Dani suffers from social anxiety and just wants to put her head down (although this will be difficult because she is so beautiful) and get through her senior year so she can graduate and go off to Harvard. Alec is no longer the awkward kid Dani once knew; he’s Southview’s star hockey player ‘Zeus’ so named, I guess, because he is huge. And hot.
Southview is a big hockey town. In fact, Dani’s grandfather is a bit of a hockey legend, even though he isn’t the grandfather Dani remembers. Anyway, Alec is sort of passive-aggressively mean to Dani and their initial interactions are awkward until Alec finds that he needs Dani’s help: in fact, he needs her to be his fake girlfriend.
Look fake dating and childhood besties to enemies to lovers are tropes that you either like or don’t. I personally don’t care about this sort of stuff when I read YA because I am mostly reading it so I can talk about it with students. My issues with this book have more to do with the length of it. At 432 pages it was about 200 pages too long because it’s really repetitive. I also hate when I have to hear about what song a character is listening to, which I did a lot every time Alec put his earbuds in. Also, there was an extraordinary amount of swearing in this book and I am no prude. It just seemed unnecessary and when expletives are overused, I find it really distracting.
Dani and Alec are sort of one dimensional characters — more outlines than people. Of course you know where a story like this is going, but it took way too long to get there and, ultimately, I just didn’t care about either of them.
