by Kate Spencer
narrated by Mia Hutchinson Shaw
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All’s Fair in Love and Pickleball is a fun and steamy contemporary sports romance by Kate Spencer.
Bex will do anything she can to save her family’s racquet club after her mother’s death. Unfortunately, many of the courts need costly repairs and she’s not sure where she’ll find the funds. One of her regulars happens to have a nephew who is a former tennis champion who suffered a career-ending injury. Perhaps, if they team-up to enter a pickleball competition, she can use the cash prize to fix everything up. And if everyone already thinks they’re dating, they may as well pretend.
I had a fun time listening to this audiobook! It was easy to tell that the narrator had a lot of fun reading this one.
The banter between our romantic couple was pretty great and I absolutely bought their chemistry. Even before they truly got together, he started calling her “princess,” which I always enjoy. The steamy scenes were fantastic, but I do wish that we had gotten Niko’s POV along with Bex’s. I especially loved seeing a neurodivergent heroine–she has ADHD and I love seeing people like me in books! There was a lovely found family element as well with the patrons at her racquetball club.
Overall I liked the pacing of the book and inhaled it in a day. I didn’t know much about pickleball going in aside from reading one other pickleball romance previously. I never felt lost and that could be partly because Bex teaches Niko the game since it’s very different than tennis.
There is a bad guy in this story and he is both a little too mustache-twirling, but also a little too absent, which came across oddly to me. But the biggest disappointment for me in this book was the third-act breakup, a trope I generally despise but felt especially egregious and unnecessary here. It really felt shoe-horned in.
That said, I think this is a great beach read or palate cleanser between heavier books. This was my first book by the author, but I’ll definitely be picking up more from her!
Rep: neurodivergent (ADHD)
Tropes: forced proximity, grumpy/sunshine, rivals to lovers, fake dating, found family
CW: death of parent to cancer (prior to book, mentioned), grief, hospitalization
I received a complimentary review copy from Forever, Hachette Audio, and NetGalley. All opinions contained herein are my own.
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