Taking PoleRating: 3.25 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novella


Glen and Javier have been bitter racing rivals since they were teenagers fighting it out on the amateur tracks. Despite their young age, they are now racing at the professional level and the stakes have raised their dislike for one another even higher…until tragedy strikes and both of them are caught in the aftermath. Thrown together to make sense of what happened, the two find a common ground and begin to wonder what they are actually fighting for.

In this enemies-to-lovers story, Glen and Javier each want to win the coveted championship and the sponsorships that go with that title. While one seeks to win as tribute to his mother and the other seeks to win to appease his father, both have dreams of what their life would be after racing. The competiveness and disdain these characters have for each other ripples off the pages. At times it seems almost immature, but then you realize that both characters are relatively young and that there is so much competitiveness in the sport to begin with that it breeds this type of behavior.

Unfortunately, this intense emotion doesn’t come through in the latter parts of the book. As the two characters begin to put their differences on the track aside and learn to appreciate each other on a personal level, readers don’t feel the same level of passion between them. Even when the tragedy strikes, it seemed as if the characters were going through the motions, but there wasn’t a whole lot of feeling to go along with it.

The only time the characters seemed to have chemistry was when they were fighting or in bed with one another. Their sexy-times together, or by themselves thinking about the one another, were well written and definitely on the warmer side of things.

I also didn’t buy the whole acceptance of these two when they were outed. While I love the idea that we’ve gotten to the point where people are free to be who they are, the reality is that most anywhere in the sporting arena is rife with homophobia. So, as a reader, I would have liked to have seen a bit more drama both between the two main characters over being outed and the other racers on the circuit.

Overall, while this book didn’t do a whole lot for me, I think readers who like books without a lot of angst will enjoy this read.

Wendy sig