The Ice Skating Romance That Made Me Miss My Subway Stop

Two Skaters, One Rink, Zero Urgency

Jasmine Santos was a rising figure skating star until an injury took her out of competition for years. Now she’s clawing her way back, and the only person who can get her there is Ivan Lukov, a former Olympic-level skater turned coach who is, by every account in this book including his own, a miserable person to be around. He’s cold. He’s rude. He barely speaks to her for what feels like the first third of the book. Jasmine needs him anyway, because he’s the best, and she takes the job knowing exactly what she’s signing up for.

Here’s the thing about the setup: nothing about it is flashy. There’s no love triangle, no secret baby, no billionaire twist. It’s a woman and a man in a cold rink at five in the morning, working. That’s it. That’s the plot for a genuinely long stretch of pages. Zapata is not interested in giving you plot as a substitute for character work, and if you go in expecting incident, you will be disappointed. What you get instead is proximity. Repetition. The two of them showing up for each other in small, wordless ways until you realize somewhere around a shared thermos of coffee or an offhand joke that you’ve been rooting for them without either of them saying anything close to romantic.

The Slowest Burn I’ve Ever Actually Finished

I read most of this book during a two week stretch where I was stuck doing overnight shifts at a job I don’t talk about much, and I remember very specifically reading the scene where Ivan shows up to Jasmine’s apartment with soup because she’s sick, says almost nothing, and leaves. I put my phone down (I was reading on my phone, don’t judge me) and just sat there in a break room under fluorescent lights feeling genuinely wrecked by a man bringing soup. That’s the power of this book when it works. Zapata builds so much restraint into Ivan that every tiny gesture lands like a gut punch.

Now, the criticism, because I promised myself I’d be honest and not just gush. The pacing is a real problem for a lot of readers and I won’t pretend it isn’t. The first 150 to 200 pages are Jasmine training, Jasmine narrating her own thoughts about training, Jasmine noticing Ivan noticing her, on loop. If you need forward momentum, you will be checking your progress bar and wondering if you accidentally downloaded a training manual. I question my own taste here honestly, because there were nights I was genuinely bored reading this and kept going out of stubbornness more than pleasure, and I’m not sure that’s a ringing endorsement even if the payoff justified it.

The other criticism, and this one’s less forgivable: this book is light on spice, almost to a fault for a book people talk about like it’s a five alarm romance. If you’re coming in expecting a lot of physical heat, you’re going to be surprised at how much of the intimacy is emotional restraint instead. That’s not a flaw exactly, it’s just not what the reputation promises.

What genuinely doesn’t work, if I’m being a real critic and not a fan with a keyboard: some of the side characters, particularly Jasmine’s family, feel thin, more plot device than person, there mostly to give her somewhere to vent between rink sessions. And the ending, when it finally comes, resolves almost too easily after 400-plus pages of tension, like Zapata got tired of building the wall and just knocked it down in twenty pages. I wanted a little more turbulence on the way to the landing.

But then there’s a scene near the end, when Ivan finally, finally says something real to Jasmine after all that silence, and it works precisely because of how long he’s been quiet. That’s not lazy writing. That’s a writer who understands that restraint is a tool, not an accident. You can find copies of it easily, including on Amazon, if you want to test your own patience against this one.

Some love stories aren’t about what people say to each other. They’re about how long two people can stand in the same cold room before one of them finally breaks.

About Mariana Zapata

Mariana Zapata writes romance the way some people cook a slow roast: low heat, a long time, no shortcuts, and if you rush it you ruin it. She’s built a career on doing the exact opposite of what romance trends tell writers to do, longer books, slower burns, less dialogue, more silence, and somehow it’s worked for her over and over. Readers either adjust to her rhythm or they bounce hard, and she seems entirely unbothered by either outcome. That confidence is all over this book.

If the slow burn got you, read these next

• The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata, for more of her signature patience and a football player who talks even less than Ivan does
• The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren, for a lighter, faster burn with the same enemies-to-lovers bones
• Beach Read by Emily Henry, if you want the emotional restraint without the sports backdrop

For your book club

1. Did the slow pacing feel earned to you, or did it start to feel like padding by the halfway point?
2. What does Ivan’s silence communicate that dialogue couldn’t have?
3. Is Jasmine’s patience with Ivan admirable, or does the book let him off the hook for how coldly he treats her early on?
4. Did the ending feel like a satisfying payoff for the slow build, or too quick after such a long wait?
5. Would this book work in a shorter form, or does the length do real narrative work?