The Favorites by Layne Fargo | The Miramichi Reader

There’s not much more you need to do to sell me on a book than to tell me it’s about figure skating. I’ve celebrated my birthday by going to Skate Canada. My mother has been a life-long lover of figure skating, and so I’ve been too. One of my favourite book series when I was kid was the Silver Blades series, and particularly the mini series that was set at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, which is probably the first Olympics that I truly remember. Anyway, I’m primed as an adult to gobble up a figure skating romance novel. The sheer mention of The Favorites by Layne Fargo activated something in me, and I scooped it up eagerly.

Young ice dancers Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha have been each other’s whole worlds since they were ten, and they’ve been skating together since then. Katarina’s focused on the dream: winning Nationals, and someday getting a gold medal, while Heath wants Katarina to be happy. Their story turns out to be a dramatic one, full of romance, obsession, drive and constant struggles against the odds – with an explosive end to their public career.

Framed as a documentary about the Shaw/Rocha ice dance rise and fall, Katarina’s story is interspersed with lines from interviews with different people about her and Heath, exploring what went right on the ice and in life for them, and what went horribly wrong. This novel is dramatic (Katarina and Heath have every possible terrible and tragic thing both bring them together and apart), but it’s also strangely heartwarming, and even better, Fargo doesn’t tie up the ends too neatly. The characters are challenging to root for, and yet I did. From a person who’s watched a lot of figure skating and knows how to skate but was never a figure skater, the depictions of rink life are pretty good, as are the competition scenes. While it’s a true ride in terms of the action and drama, this was also one of the most fun books I’ve read lately, with all kinds of Hollywood glitz in the background, and a very satisfying one to boot. I think a lot of us are in need of some escapism, and a book set in the 1990s and 2000s about ice dance is one of the tickets away.

Layne Fargo has a background in theater, women’s studies, and library science, so it’s only fitting that she now writes deliciously dramatic, unapologetically feminist stories for a living. She’s the author of psychological thrillers They Never Learn and Temper, as well as co-author on the bestselling Young Rich Widows series, and her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Layne lives in Chicago with her partner, their pets, and an ever-expanding collection of books she’s definitely going to read before she dies.

Publisher: Penguin Random House (January 14, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 448 pages
ISBN: 9780593736821

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.