This book made me scream in frustration at the characters, in heartbreak and finally in happiness for the fantastic ending. A true gold medal, 5 star book I'd read again and again. And watch the documentary.

I stayed up way passed my bedtime to finish this because I had to know what happened to Kat and Heath. They and the supporting characters are so well written that they play before your eyes. I was invested, heavily, in the outcome and all the happenings around it. There's romance, drama, mystery and friendship - all in the mix.

The way the story is told is very unique. A mix of narrative, descriptive footage and interviews makes so an engrossing read. A Netflix doc and behind the scenes footage really had me hooked.

My only knowledge of ice dancing was Torvill and Dean and Dancing on Ice. This books gives an in-depth look in to the sport and man is it twisted! But oh how you want more.

Grab this book for a late night, passed your bedtime, have to finish it now kinda read. Be engrossed in the music, stay for the drama and revel in the amazing story.

The Favourites, by Layne Fargo, may only be the second book I’ve read this year but I have to say I feel like it might be in my absolute top favourites come the end of ‘25. My goodness was this book so very good.

If you loved the format of Daisy Jones, the incredibly strong (and cut throat) women in sport of Carrie Soto, the drama of I, Tonya and the tension and longing of Wuthering Heights all mixed together in what is in itself an incredibly unique and thoroughly compelling story you’ll adore The Favourites. I simply couldn’t put it down. This needs to be made into a movie or show right?!

The Favourites is Kat Shaw’s account of her, and Heath Rocha’s, dramatic rise and fall as the favourites of ice dance. Shaw’s account alternates with scandalous interviews from the unauthorised tell all documentary that followed ten years after Shaw and Rocha’s explosive final Olympic appearance. The Favourites follows Shaw and Heath from child hood sweethearts to champion dancers, where they captivate fans with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style and rollercoaster relationship.

There is so very much I could, and would like to say about this one, but I also don’t want to say a lot. This is the kind of book that you should go into blind and allow yourself to be blown away by. The characters are brilliant, and often diabolical. Their pursuit of glory, regardless of the cost is something else. The glorious and also toxic love story had me hooked! The twists and turns made me gasp and made it impossible to stop reading. The way Fargo seamlessly time jumped via the major events in Kat and Heath’s life worked perfectly. This is a longer book but do you know I would have been happy to have read even more!

Do not let The Favourites pass you by, it’s insanely good.

I was hooked from the opening line of this book and really struggled to stop reading until I got to the end! Luckily it was a Christmas read for me and I was able to slip off regularly to race through to the end. What a story - so exciting and unpredictable! Just when I thought I knew where it was going, I was thrown a curve ball. I read a review which compared it to 'Daisy Jones,' and I would have to agree with that comparison. This is a story which is being partly told through interviews for a TV documentary, many of which comments on big events and then the book flicks to the back story which is told by Kat, the protagonist, in the first person. I felt like I was invited into her life and she was confiding in me. None of the characters in this book are blameless and some are downright mean to others. The competitive nature of skating means that every person must look out for themselves.

I thought the character development was sublime and the description of settings, clothes and skating routines were breathtaking. Such a satisfactory read with an unexpected ending - this would make the most fabulous movie or box set and I can't wait for someone to pick it up! Glamour, greed and glory ... not to be missed!

Thank you Netgalley and Random House UK Vintage for the ARC and the opportunity to read this book pre-release. All thoughts are my own.

50000000/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

When I picked up this book I was bracing myself for disappointment. First of all, the comparison to Daisy Jones set the bar SO high for me, that I was sure it couldn’t live up to the standard. And second of all, Booktok has unfortunately lowered and ruined the quality of ice skating content for me (Icebreaker yes, I’m talking about you).

That’s why I couldn’t be more surprised and ecstatic, when the first thing I wrote on my temporary Goodreads review was: “I fear I didn’t finish this book, this book finished me. I am OBSESSED, I will never ever shut up about this.”
I don’t think I can express in words how much this book swept me off my feet.

Let’s start from the beginning, this is the incredible and drama-filled story of Katarina Shawn and her ice skating partner, of the relationship with each other and ice dancing. Katarina’s ultime goal in life is getting to and winning the Olympics but the road to an Olympic gold isn’t easy.

Saying that I have been HOOKED in by this book, would be un understatement. This novel consumed me in the best of way. As an ultime lover of ice skating and of good fake historical fiction, this was my ultimate cup of tea.
It’s as if, Layne Fargo wrote this book for me, and I will forever be grateful. The mix of the interview style and first-person retelling of events was not only incredibly well balanced and written, but very powerful and perfectly tailored to the narrative.

I am in extra awe that this is the first fiction book of this author and Layne, if you will ever read me, PLEASE NEVER STOP. PLEASE GIVE ME MORE. I wanna read a 20 books long series of your own fictional world sport celebrities and I promise I will never tire of it!

This is a masterpiece and I fear I will have to reread it regularly because it’s my new obsession and comfort read.

So yes. I would highly recommend this book to fans of Taylor J Reid, because it did live up the the standard of Daisy Jones. And I would recommend it to lovers of ice skating, because it gives a wonderful, meaningful and (for what I know) realistic insight on issues and dramas of this sport. And of course, it adds so many good plot twists and turns and high quality romance and angst (it is fiction after all)

One of my favourite reads last year was Daisy Jones and the Six, for its documentary/interview style formatting and this has such a similar vibe! I’ll definitely do a re-read when the audiobook is released as it would be such a good full cast audio.

The Favourites is the story of Katarina and Heath, figure skaters best known not for their successes but their scandal. Katarina Shaw knows her destiny is go become an Olympic skater and when she meets Heath Rocha, their ‘instant connection makes them a formidable duo’. To escape their tumultuous lives they cling to each other on and off the ice - captivating audiences with their ‘scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and rollercoaster relationship.’ That is until an incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end.

At the 10 year anniversary of their final skate an unauthorised documentary reignites public fascination - as the ‘real story’ is claimed to be revealed through interviews with their friends and rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but doesn’t want someone else to define her legacy - so now she’s telling her story. And the truth may be more shocking than the headlines.

I loved the character of Kat - bad traumatic childhood but focused on her dreams. All she wants is to be an Olympian like her idol. Similarly, Heath’s childhood was also traumatic. He just wants to help Kat achieve her dreams.

The side characters were so well developed - Bella and Garrett especially. I loved their subplots and the dynamic her friendship with Bella gave the story.

Jam packed with tension, drama and twists this was a really enjoyable read. To see just how determined Kat was to achieve her dreams, no matter who got hurt in the process, and how this shaped her relationship with Heath. Especially at the novels conclusion when we see how their story ended!

ARC copy provided by Random House UK, Vintage & NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is drama. Complex, rollercoaster-y, angsty, toxic DRAMA. And I stayed up until 3am to finish it because I couldn't put it down. 5 stars! I hated almost every single character and their actions at multiple points. But that was the point? I felt all the things. (So) angry, (so) sad, (so) frustrated, anxious, kind of morbidly curious, a smidge triumphant here and there. The writing is brilliant, the oral history narration style in parts was the perfect choice, and I was gripped from start to finish.

This book messed with my head, but wow, it was SO. GOOD.

This is like the Virtue/Moir Moulin Rouge Free Dance at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics in book form.

My expectations were too high to be honest, since figure skating is my special interest and there is such a lack of good literature about the sport available. The start of the book seemed so promising and I grew to care for the characters but as I read on, the book failed to convey the complexities of both Kat & Heath's personalities.

The plot was also kind of scattered with no large driving force other than Kat's ambition. In my opinion, that's not enough to carry the entire book since the layers of her ambition were not explored enough. For me there was too little skating and too much off ice drama. I wanted to know more about the intricate details of the sport.

Towards the end, crazier and crazier things started happening which could have been books on their own. The sabotage plot line was not well developed at all and the mystery surrounding Heath's disappearance & his scars was so flimsy that when the grand reveal happened, I didn't feel anything.

This book could have been everything to me but alas, it fell largely flat. I do, however, see how others could fall in love with it so I will be recommending it far and wide.

This was a really original format for a book. And the layout and added extras made it intriguing and had me hooked from the off. It managed to tell many.differing perspectives. It made it both personal but reflective too. As if we were watching from right next to the characters but from above too!
It was so much .more than a romance and yet all about the romance.
It was just a hook line and sinker of a good book from the very beginning. And yet I was still rooting for the characters. Or at least that they might be OK
.

Oh this book is just so much FUN!

I picked this up on a Saturday evening after trudging through my previous read and I’d read 30% before I even realised.

I absolutely love the oral history format in the same vein as Daisy Jones and the Six, interspersed with Kat’s perspective. I really felt like I was watching a documentary.

And this book does not let us. It’s juicy and fun and every few pages seem to end with a cliffhanger which makes you race to the next page.

I read this over 2 days but it will be a perfect beach read.

So juicy and fun and incredibly well-researched. I knew nothing about the world of competitive ice dancing and now I feel like I know a lot more!

I’m not sure if I was ever rooting for Kat and Heath… but I definitely wanted to know what was going to happen next.

Juicy and scandalous without being over the top or unrealistic, this was such a fun read.

5 stars.

Dynamic, scintillating, thrilling ugh I loved this. If you’re a fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid style narratives of the famous then this is one for you.


⛸️ wuthering heights reimagining
⛸️ competitive ice dancing / figure skating world
⛸️ love to hate to love again
⛸️ messy dramatic love story
⛸️ drama, scandal and gossip
⛸️ documentary style narrative

Thanks to the publishers for my copy!

✨5 stars✨

Wow! This was amazing!

I’d read Wuthering Heights at uni so I was familiar with the characters and plot, but I loved what the author did with her nods to the original whilst also creating a whole new story with the backdrop of skating and the Olympics which creating an intoxicating mix where I couldn’t put the book down!

I also really enjoyed the documentary aspect to the book with interviews with certain characters which added another layer to the story!! If you have read Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid and enjoyed that and the format it was written, then you would enjoy this aspect.

Overall, I would recommend this book to everyone!

I received an ARC from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

Thank you PRH/Vintage books for the arc!

Messy, complex, dramatic, intense, spellbinding. A really interesting format that made this read impossible to put down. This was addictive - the characters, the plot, the drama, the SCANDALS.

The Favourites has reminded me why I love reading. It was beyond what I expected the story to be. The format of the documentary style with the real-time experience made it so addicting. This book was a reminder to read outside your comfort zone sometimes!

Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha were an unstoppable force of nature in the world of ice dancing but their partnership was fraught with drama and pain. 10 years ago, an incident at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics ended their career with the ice covered in blood. Now a Netflix documentary seeks to uncover the many tumultuous ups and downs of their career leading up the their dramatic final bow. Alongside interviews from the documentary, Katarina will tell the real story.

This book immediately had me hooked as it moved forward at a fast clip telling Katarina and Heath’s story with plenty of intrigue about what was to come. It was fascinating to watch these characters’ stories unfold and I really enjoyed hypothesising about the details of where the narrative was taking us. I started coming up with all kinds of theories informed by the people who weren’t involved in telling the story through the Netflix documentary. This momentum didn’t really continue for the whole story unfortunately as around the halfway point, it felt as though the threads of Katarina and Heath’s journey was being concluded and I was left wondering what was left to be told. This was despite it clearly being stated at the beginning of the story that their story ended at the Sochi Winter Olympics and by that point in the book we had only reached Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.
The story seemed to limp along in the second half of the book, largely because Katarina’s world became quite separate from those of the rest of the cast and we essentially had a three year time jump where Katarina…. Did nothing? I think the book could have benefited from reminding the reader explicitly that it was in Sochi where the real drama occurred as opposed to implicitly doing so by having so much of the book left. The writing was still very good in the latter half of the book but the character dynamics felt a little messy and confused. I think that intention was to show the enduring feelings that existed between Katarina and Heath despite the time and the journey they have been on however I just didn’t feel the spark between them; they created magic on the ice but their romance? That felt like something from their past and not their future.
Where I really felt cheated by this book was the conclusion. Fargo knew exactly what she had been doing in the beginning of the story so the reveal felt as though it lacked the bite that I had been expecting. I did start to cry a little however the punches were then pulled and I was left underwhelmed by this being where we had been working towards all along. I suppose the point was to subvert expectations but I just didn’t feel satisfied by the ending; Katarina had realised that there were things more important than winning but why did it feel less like that and more like settling?
I will conclude my review by noting that this book is vaguely a Wuthering Heights retelling. It has been some years since I have read Bronte’s classic so it is hard for me to compare the two but I think the similarities lie more in the broad strokes as opposed to the finer details and that works well for this story as I think sticking to the source material would have made for a messier tale but it is fun to spot the Easter Eggs and I hope that in the future we get a breakdown of all of the links between the two stories - looking at you Ellen “Nelly” Dean who becomes Ellis Dean!

I was really excited to read this and it did not disappoint. At times I felt like I was watching a train crash about to happen and Kath and Heath very much reminded me of the turbulent relationship in Wuthering Heights. I really liked how the book was written and found it quick to read. The ending was nice and not what I was expecting after reading the powerfully emotive previous pages.

I was so into the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics as a 13 year old, that my sister and brother nicknamed me Lillehammer for a time 😅. I couldn’t get enough of it, especially the ice-skating, much of it I’m sure driven at the time by the media scrutiny on Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, and the return of Torvill and Dean. I also had a crush on French skater Philippe Candeloro who had a penchant for spinning on his shins (a move now banned) - what can I say, it was an exciting time to be alive.

Inspiration for this new mockumentary style-novel The Favourites has been drawn from the period (and indeed from Torvill and Dean’s 1984 Bolero), when a sport know for its propriety and decorum was turned on its head somewhat. Throw in Sochi 2014 and Russian corruption and tada, truth is stranger than fiction.

Kat and Heath (Wuthering Heights anyone?) are skaters from the wrong side of the tracks so to speak, from broken and abusive homes but with a raw talent and passion for skating and each other. They attract the attention of US ice dance legend Sheila Lin, who invites them to skate at her academy to challenge and bring out the best in her own children, twins Garrett and Bella Lin (yes, think Stranz and Fairchild). Will Kat and Heath go on to achieve their Olympic dream or will their wild passionate ways be their downfall?

This was a very enjoyable pageturner, whilst also too long (464 pages, why?) and a bit ridiculous - but ice-skating is a mad world. If you’ve watched I, Tonya or you’re familiar with the sport you’ll already know that.

There’s the inevitable Taylor Jenkins Reid comparison - The Favourites follows the same format at Daisy Jones, and has the same juicy, cinematic, celebrity-tell-all tabloid style (there’s a movie coming too btw). It was missing a bit more tongue-in-cheek humour for me, taking itself a bit too seriously at times, and it is just too long. I didn’t care for the characters by the end as a result, but I still wanted to find out how it ended. An enjoyable romp, nostalgia factor high for me. 4/5⭐️

Many thanks to @vintagebooks for the arc. Honest review as always. Out 16 Jan.

How to delete from my brain all the memories of reading this book so I can experience the pain and the joy all over again?

They say this book is Wuthering Heights x Daisy Jones and this description is so ON POINT, but I feel like it's also Carrie Soto + a toxic romance in another universe. The first time I heard about this release I knew if done well it was going to be a very good one, but I didn't know it would CONSUME ME from beginning to end. Once you get to really know the characters it's impossible to put this book down. You hate them and you love them, and it's a delicious cycle LF puts you through. The competition and the plot twists killed me infinite times, I turned the pages one after the other like crazy to know how everything was going to unfold, I was equally obsessed with the sports and the relationships parts.

The format is so interesting, it's just perfect the way the narrative and the documentary intersect. There's a great balance between the two as well, you never feel like it's too many interviews; in fact it's the opposite, because at some point you just NEED to hear what the main character or the others have to say about this major event. I wish I had listened to the audiobook too, because I'm sure it's going to be a hit with this format and a full cast. A reread it's bound to happen at some point, it's THAT GOOD. (I also need a movie like right now.) You can absolutely see this book was worked on for a long time to get it to where it is now.

Absolutely raced through this book - have spent hours at ice rinks watching my kids and other competitive figure skaters - and I loved the film I Tonya and loved the story so much. I'm also a sucker for an emotional love story and this gave it all! Great characters and fascinating world. Just loved it!

So amazing! 😍 I absolutely loved this, the drama, the characters, just everything about it was amazing 🤩

God this book was a messy whirlwind of emotions!

I am a fiend for a good ice skating story and this definitely delivered, I lost a good nights sleep trying to get to the end.

There’s love, drama, betrayal and tears (some of them mine) all wrapped up in the intensity of competitive ice skating and becoming a world class athlete.
I didn’t realise until after I had finished that it is Wuthering Heights inspired and it definitely shines through.

Ate this up and loved! This would make a great Daisy Jones & The Six vibes tv series and I hope this gets the praise it deserves when it comes out.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher
5 ⭐️

I am a sucker for an ice skating love story.
It was realistic and didn't gloss over the hard work and heartbreak. Both characters had a bad start in life and both poured everything into being their best.
Katrina and Heath were the best and the worst for each other at times.
Life seems easier for the privileged skaters with money in the sports world neither of which they have.
They eventually split under the pressure they have an upsy downsy relationship.
No one knows the real truth of the circumstances of the split except those involved.
Heath needs to be a bit more able to stand up for himself.
Katrina is sometimes annoying in that she doesn't see who she is trampling on to get to the top.
I did love this book you felt you were living their ups and downs and rooting for them hoping there might be a second chance while reading the story.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher.