Why I read it:  I was provided with a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

What it’s about: (from Goodreads)  Champion kickboxer Haley swore she’d never set foot in the ring again after one tragic night. But then the guy she can’t stop thinking about accepts a mixed martial arts fight in her honor. Suddenly, Haley has to train West Young. All attitude, West is everything Haley promised herself she’d stay away from. Yet he won’t last five seconds in the ring without her help.

West is keeping a big secret from Haley. About who he really is. But helping her-fighting for her-is a shot at redemption. Especially since it’s his fault his family is falling apart. He can’t change the past, but maybe he can change Haley’s future.

Hayley and West have agreed to keep their relationship strictly in the ring. But as an unexpected bond forms between them and attraction mocks their best intentions, they’ll face their darkest fears and discover love is worth fighting for.

*Spoilers for previous books in the series follow. Be ye warned.*

What worked for me (and what didn’t):  I quite liked West in the previous book in the series, Crash Into You. West was good looking, a little cocky and therefore not perfect, but he also tries hard, in his own way, to help his family.  Unfortunately, he feels his actions always lead to disaster and he perceives himself to be a failure.  In fact, given that he was always told he was conceived in order to be a bone marrow match for his then-dying sister Colleen (he was not a match), he feels he has been a failure from birth.  He resents his dad, who spends almost all of his time working and most all of what attention is left over is for West’s mum.  West wants his attention sure, but he also wants his dad to step up and be a more active dad.  Then maybe West won’t feel like it’s up to him to fix things for everyone.  Then maybe West won’t muck up as much.    West is impulsive (which often gets him into trouble) and, after he gets into yet another fight at school, he is finally expelled.  His dad, fed up with the drama from West, confronts him, they have a nasty fight and West is thrown out.

The story fits in between the main action of Crash Into You and the epilogue.  Rachel, West’s beloved sister, is in the ICU when the book starts and no-one is certain she will live and if she does, they don’t know if she will walk again. There wasn’t any tension in that for me because, having read the epilogue, I know she does both.  Nevertheless, tensions are particularly high: West blames himself for Rachel’s accident, it is apparent that rather than face up to his own part in the crash, West’s dad is happy enough to blame him too.  Rachel wants to see West but West doesn’t think he deserves to see her and stays away.  Instead of spending all of her time involved in her charities, West’s mum spends all of her time at the hospital.

There is little of the other family members in this book.  Ethan (Rachel’s twin) has a small part but Jack and Gavin are absent.  When West is kicked out of home, he doesn’t go to his brothers (who live together in an apartment) or to his grandparents.  In defiance and self-punishment, West sleeps in his car and showers at a truck stop or later, at the gym.  To be honest, it didn’t occur to me that West could easily have gone to his brothers.  I had forgotten they live elsewhere and they were not really in the book, so it was easy for me to forget their existence altogether.  Knowing that West had as many options as he did, well it’s hard to think that his actions after he was thrown out were terribly mature.

That said, West faces up to what it is like to be homeless, with no money and no job.  He gets handyperson work in a bar and pawns his watch to survive.  He goes without food and his sleep is poor because it’s winter, so: cold.  During the course of the book, he learns a bit about thinking with his head and not just his heart and emotions and he also appreciates the satisfaction of doing things on his own.

Haley Williams is at the other end of the scale.  Her family was solidly middle class until her father lost his job and a series of other financial setbacks meant they lost their house.  Haley, her parents and her older brother Kaden and younger sister Maggie spent some time in a homeless shelter before they were reluctantly taken in by her evil uncle (her father’s half-brother).  Haley, Kaden and Jax (their cousin, the evil uncle’s son) are very close.  Their grandfather owns a fighting gym and Kaden and Jax are amateur MMA fighters. Haley is a champion kickboxer.  Or, she was.  She was dating Matt, a fighter from a rival gym and things ended badly – just dating Matt led to tensions with her family (not without cause) and after the breakup, which was violent, Haley no longer fights at all.  The uncle’s house is a two bedroom affair in a poor neighbourhood, Haley sleeps on an air mattress in the attic, the younger children (including other young cousins) sleep in the basement and Jax and Kaden sleep in the living room.  There are 10 people crowded into a small house which the uncle rules with an iron fist. He treats everyone poorly and makes it clear that if his rules are bucked at all, Haley and her family are out.  The uncle insisted they give him their car when they move in so now they have nothing except the few possessions they can carry with them.

The uncle was a bit of a caricature and fairly one note but I felt for Haley and her family.  Haley’s dad is depressed and cannot find work, Haley’ s mum is working two low-paying jobs to help support the family and this means Haley feels she cannot turn to them for support.  For various reasons, she believes she’s not worth fighting for.  No-one has to date.  Meeting West changes that.  Whereas West is too impulsive, Haley is too much in her own head – she has withdrawn and mostly doesn’t engage and the story, in effect, is about both teenagers finding a workable balance, as well as for Haley, returning to the gym, to training and kickboxing.

I enjoyed the setting of Muay Thai kickboxing and MMA fighting – they had an authentic feel to them (not that I’d know) and I liked the way the story ended – I thought it was fitting and right and not saccharine or unrealistic.  I found myself quite caught up in the different struggles West and Haley had.  I think Ms. McGarry writes the “you and me against the world” trope really well.  As is often the case with a Katie McGarry book, I ended up staying up way too late to finish it.

What else? Although they weren’t obvious when I was reading, there were some things I noticed when I thought about the story afterwards.  I commented in my review of Crash Into You that I thought Rachel’s (and West’s) mother had a rather miraculous change from being obsessed over Colleen to treating Rachel like her own person.  That kind of behaviour, so ingrained, well, it seemed to me it would take more to really change.  Here, there was no real mention of it. Mrs. Young is described as obsessing over Colleen and Rachel both. I found the idea that she could keep up the monthly commitment of her mysterious visits a little incongruous with what I knew of her from the earlier book.  And, as I said above, the other Young siblings were notable by their absence in the story.

I did think the subplot involving Mr. and Mrs. Young and the bar and the “mystery” was perhaps a little melodramatic and I can’t say I entirely understood West’s decisions regarding his finances and living arrangements at the end of the story.

Abby remains a fascinating character, and now I’m also quite interested in what will become of Jax and Kaden.

I appreciated that there were no miraculous answers for Rachel’s parents but that things ended on a hopeful note.

There is starting to be some “sameness” in the stories.  While I enjoy them, I’m hoping for future books to stretch out a little differently. Perhaps I’m an outlier in that department though?

Even with some flaws, Ms. McGarry writes compelling characters and I found myself wanting to swoop in and rescue these young people who are struggling so much with things they ought not to have to at their age (even though I know that people their age deal with such things all the time in real life).  I enjoy the writing and I get caught up in the world created in these stories. It’s another excellent instalment in a very strong series. I liked it very much.

Grade: B+

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