WARNING: This article may contain spoilers for the novel Icebreaker by Hannah Grace.
For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to read. I grew up reading books like Divergent, The Hunger Games, The Mortal Instruments series, the PJO series, and perhaps most importantly: niche one-off romance novels. A cheesy romance novel on a rainy night has probably been my biggest guilty pleasure since I was in middle school. With that being said, I’ve also read some truly terrible romance novels in my day. At the top of my list, winning my award for the worst romance novel I’ve ever read, a “BookTok” favorite: Icebreaker by Hannah Grace.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the plot of this book, it follows Anastasia “Stassie” Allen (worst nickname ever, by the way), a UC Maple Hills figure skater whose only personality traits are that she’s flexible and a figure skater. She then meets Nathan Hawkins, captain of the hockey team. When someone pranks the hockey team, ruining their rink, it forces them to share the second rink with the figure skaters. Conveniently, Nathan’s only two personality traits are that he plays hockey and that he has muscles, so I guess they’re a match made in heaven. The book then follows what Hannah Grace must consider a romantic story and what I consider a story about the two worst people you know forcing themselves to date because they both play ice sports, or something.
I’m probably being a bit unnecessarily harsh, but I truly do not understand what the hype is surrounding this book. The plot is so underdeveloped it hurts, the book is 90% poorly written smut, and not one of the characters are likable. I don’t even remember half the conflicts that happened in this book. I would also rather get a root canal than read the “Gru scene” in this book ever again. But while I really dislike this book, it speaks to a larger issue of BookTok pumping out bad romance novels like it’s fast fashion.
When I first ended up on BookTok, I was super excited. A community of like-minded people who just wanted to share their book recommendations sounded right up my alley. As BookTok developed, there was a need to recommend more books at a faster rate. BookTok content creators needed, well, content. And with that, authors like Hannah Grace and Colleen Hoover get a spotlight that they probably shouldn’t have.
I’m not saying all BookTok recommendations are bad. I’ve found some of my favorite books on TikTok and been able to share my love for them with a wide community of people. However, for every one good romance book I’ve read, there are about ten really bad ones. If you do like Icebreaker, maybe you don’t agree with my views on the book and BookTok, and I don’t claim to know everything about every book ever. However, the way BookTok is currently going, there is a push for quantity over quality. With BookTok being so widespread and even landing tables at chains like Barnes & Noble, I would love to see more thought put into the books being recommended.
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