Book Stats
- Publication Date: 09/30/25
- Format: ebook
- Chapters: 49 (plus 1 prologue and 2 epilogues)
- Pages: 448
- Narrator POV: Told in 1st person & alternates between the 2 main characters – Dani & Alec
Book Rating
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Spice: 🌶️/5
Summary & Review
I absolutely love Lynn Painter. I’ve read just about everything she’s ever written and her YA books are some of my favorites. She creates interesting characters and adorable love stories. Needless to say, I was so excited when Fake Skating became available on Libby and I read it as soon as I could!
Fake Skating follows Dani and Alec – two kids who spent their summers together bonding and forming an unbreakable friendship. Their mothers were friends, but Dani’s mom had moved away when she married Dani’s dad, so the summers were the only time they saw each other anymore.
The prologue of this story touches on that friendship and how things were slowly starting to evolve into something potentially more, but Dani’s family would no longer be coming back to the area after Dani’s father and grandfather got into a huge argument. Alec and Dani planned to continue talking via postcards they sent each other, but somewhere along the way one of them quit reaching out to the other and it changed everything.
In the first chapter of this story we see that Dani’s parents divorced and her mom decided to move back to the town they always used to visit. At this point, 5 years have passed and both Dani and Alec have a version of events they believe occurred that ultimately caused the end of their friendship.
So now, back together and navigating high school, Dani and Alec must figure out what happened and whether things are worth fixing. Both have changed drastically – Alec with sports and the pressures that come with it and Dani with the experiences she had while moving from school to school and how that impacted her current personality and world views.
This adorable book includes a friends-to-lovers romance, fake dating, and plenty of miscommunication. I will add that if you’re a parent trying to decide if this book is right for your kid – there is quite a bit of cussing. Aside from that, the book has almost no spice (there’s some kissing), some light and vague mentions of substance use (marijuana and alcohol), and some light bullying – nothing too substantial. This book also has a huge focus on the pressures Dani and Alec face in regard to their families, their futures, and situations in their pasts that had a huge impact on them.
I gave this book 4 stars because I really enjoyed. I think it’s a cute story and the tropes were well done – I do enjoy fake dating and miscommunication tropes quite a bit. I think this would be a great book for young adults, as long as the cussing isn’t an issue. It’s consistent with the way teenagers speak, so I didn’t find anything particularly wrong with it.
I gave this book 1 chili pepper because based on our rating scale, kissing can be considered a level of spice that many readers don’t want. So to accurately rate books that include kissing, we rate them 1 pepper.
Leave a Reply