What works best is the sports setting. Grace clearly enjoys the mechanics of elite skating, the early mornings, the politics of ice time, and the way an athlete's entire life narrows to a scoresheet. Anastasia's ambition is treated as a serious thing rather than a personality quirk to be cured by love, and the book is at its most convincing when she is exhausted and still getting up for practice. Nate is a good counterpart for her because he is not there to soften her: he is there to take up ice time, argue about it, and eventually bring coffee.

The supporting cast carries a surprising amount of the load. The hockey players are stupid in the way real teams are stupid together, the skating partner subplot gives the middle of the book its stakes, and there is a running joke about the state of the shared changing rooms that got an actual laugh out of me on public transport, which I would like on the record.

Now the thing everybody says about this book, and I am going to say it too because it is true: there is not much of a plot holding the two of them up. The relationship advances through scenes rather than through a story with a shape, and somewhere in the middle the novel settles into a routine of practice, dinner and bedroom, competently written and pleasant to listen to, but noticeably longer than its engine can pull. Several listeners have put this much more bluntly than I will, describing it as having no plot at all and being slow despite how much happens, and one review sums it up by saying it looks fast paced and then eases into a normal routine. I felt that at around the ninth hour, when I was enjoying myself and still wondering what we were building towards.

The other thing, smaller and honest: for a book that becomes extremely explicit, the emotional conflicts are solved with a speed that undercuts the tension. A lot of talking things out is a nice change from the miscommunication genre, and I would not trade it, but it does mean the last third has less to push against than the first.

One more thing in its favour, since this is an audio review and not a book review: the production understands that the two narrators are playing people who spend most of the book in the same building. The handovers happen mid-conversation, nobody re-reads the other person's line, and the result is closer to a two-hander play than to the usual alternating chapters. It is a small technical choice that makes thirteen hours feel shorter than they are.

None of which stopped me recommending it. Thirteen hours and twenty-three minutes is long for a comfort read and the narration makes it go down easily, with a clean handover between the two voices and no attempt to make anybody sound like a cartoon. If you want a winter book that feels like sitting in a warm rink, this is exactly that, and the length stops mattering about an hour in.

For the rest of the series, Wildfire (Maple Hills 2) picks up with different leads in the same world, and Daydream (Maple Hills 3) is the third volume, both already on this site.