I’m not an F1 girlie (sorry) and I can’t say I understand the recent hype surrounding F1. BUT, I am a sports romance girlie, so I just had to try Cross the Line by Simone Soltani.
Cross the Line by Simone Soltani
Formula 1 driver Dev Anderson’s career is on the line. After a social media disaster leaves him with an angry team and sponsors threatening to jump ship, he needs someone to help save his image. At a party in Monaco, he bumps into the woman who can fix it all. There’s just one problem: she’s his best friend’s little sister. And, okay, maybe there’s another problem—he kissed her last year and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Recent college grad Willow Williams needs a job. She may have a talent for seeing the bright side of any bad situation, but it’s hard to stay positive when she’s struggling to get hired. So when Dev offers her a temporary solution, she can’t help but say yes. Even if it means ignoring the crush she’s had on him since childhood.
Willow and Dev are determined to keep things strictly professional, regardless of old feelings and the blazing chemistry between them. But in the glittering and high-stakes world of Formula 1, some lines are meant to be crossed…
I’ve been an avid romance reader for a while now, but lately, I’m just burnt out on the genre. Like I still find romance books very enjoyable, but five-star romances have been few and far between.
I listened to the audiobook of Cross the Line (thank you Netgalley) and it was both a good and bad experience. The male narrator did an amazing job. He was into it, and it felt like he was really enjoying himself. Unfortunately, the female narrator put me off a bit. She sounded very young, and was very monotone.
Overall this book read very young. The characters were 21 and 25, but it still felt a bit YA to me. The way the characters talked, thought, and handled certain situations made them seem more like teenagers, but it could have also been the delivery of the narration.
Low stakes, low angst
Cross the Line was also very low stakes. There’s nothing wrong with that, I know a lot of people want lower-stakes romance books with no third-act breakup, but that’s not me. I want the angst, the pining, the hurt.
For example, a main conflict is that he’s her boss, and she’s his employee. They don’t want to taint her reputation by being in a relationship (as she would be seen as “sleeping with the boss to get on top”), but they aren’t careful with their interactions at all. They make out in a club full of other people at one point, and I thought for sure they would be caught and would have to navigate that, but it just didn’t happen.
It felt like these conflicts were being set up, but they didn’t pay off. And that’s fine. The conflicts were handled in mostly mature ways, I just wish there was more tension. I would have made different editing choices (especially during the prologue), but overall this wasn’t a bad book.
Is it a good F1 romance?
I can’t be the judge of that. I know next to nothing about F1, so I can’t tell if the “sport” part of this book was accurate. It is dual POV, so we do get a lot of Dev’s perspective when he’s actually racing, which I liked.
I also think we got some progressive representation in this book. Dev is South Asian and Willow is Black, and Willow has hyper-mobility, something I knew very little about before starting this book, but now I know more!
Cross the Line is a fun, joyful sports romance. I laughed out loud a few times and I really liked some of the side characters. I would definitely read more from Soltani (hoping she turns this into a series actually) and I would read more F1 romances as well.
I received a review copy from Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
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