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A review by bethgiven
Break the Fall by Jennifer Iacopelli
3.0
"A lump slides up into my throat, but I swallow it back. Showing weakness isn't an option, not now. Not ever."
Elite gymnast Audrey Lee has just made the Olympic team with her best friend Emma, veteran Chelsea, and rising star Dani. Her success has caught the attention of super-cute Leo Adams, which is certainly a bonus. But then one of her teammates is abruptly disqualified, her coach is fired, and the whole team is without a place to train, just weeks before the Tokyo games. To top it off, her teammates are fighting and a previous injury is threatening her Olympic dreams.
This is obviously a fictional account of the Tokyo Olympics, one in which the games actually happened in 2020 with crowds cheering in the stands and no COVID testing or masks in the Olympic village. Yet so many themes seemed eerily similar to these games: a star gymnast stumbling when she never had before, the team falling short of Olympic gold, the focus on the mental game and the importance of mental health. It's a little eerie, actually, to see how much of this book got right, in spite of being published before the pandemic and the games that ended up happening in 2021. I have been thinking so much of Simone Biles and her story these past few weeks, and this book felt like a variation on that theme, one that highlights the pressures and risks of the sport of gymnastics.
I flew through the last half of the book. The storytelling is pretty simplistic in some places -- this is YA -- but I appreciated the important themes it brought up, and it was just plain fun to read the play-by-plays of each qualification and competition.
CLEAN READERS: quite a lot of profanity in this one. Trigger warning for sexual assault (there aren't details, but it is a major theme of the book).
Elite gymnast Audrey Lee has just made the Olympic team with her best friend Emma, veteran Chelsea, and rising star Dani. Her success has caught the attention of super-cute Leo Adams, which is certainly a bonus. But then one of her teammates is abruptly disqualified, her coach is fired, and the whole team is without a place to train, just weeks before the Tokyo games. To top it off, her teammates are fighting and a previous injury is threatening her Olympic dreams.
This is obviously a fictional account of the Tokyo Olympics, one in which the games actually happened in 2020 with crowds cheering in the stands and no COVID testing or masks in the Olympic village. Yet so many themes seemed eerily similar to these games: a star gymnast stumbling when she never had before, the team falling short of Olympic gold, the focus on the mental game and the importance of mental health. It's a little eerie, actually, to see how much of this book got right, in spite of being published before the pandemic and the games that ended up happening in 2021. I have been thinking so much of Simone Biles and her story these past few weeks, and this book felt like a variation on that theme, one that highlights the pressures and risks of the sport of gymnastics.
I flew through the last half of the book. The storytelling is pretty simplistic in some places -- this is YA -- but I appreciated the important themes it brought up, and it was just plain fun to read the play-by-plays of each qualification and competition.
CLEAN READERS: quite a lot of profanity in this one. Trigger warning for sexual assault (there aren't details, but it is a major theme of the book).