Book Review

Every Reason We Shouldn’t by Sara Fujimara

Content warning: Lockdown situation at a high school, emotionally absent/neglectful parents. Also, the main characters are professional athletes and talk/think about food and nutrition in a way that might be triggering for people with eating disorders.

The thing that happens when you follow certain romance authors on Twitter for a while is that you find yourself slowly becoming obsessed with figure skating. This is a rather disappointing obsession to have in Australia, where the ISU competitions are generally not broadcast on our free-to-air channels until months after the event, and even then, only partially. And so my new obsession has to manifest itself in other ways, such as by seeking out and devouring figure skating-themed romances…

In Every Reason We Shouldn’t, we meet two young skaters, Olivia Kennedy and Jonah Choi. Olivia is a former Junior World Champion Pairs figure skater, whose foray into the Senior division went so badly that at the age of fifteen, she is a washed-up has-been, going to regular school and giving lessons at the ice skating rink owned by her parents. Her parents, who were Olympic Gold Medallists in Pairs skating, and heavily invested her skating career, have become distant and even absent since her career-ending performance six months ago, and she receives more support from her ‘stunt-double mom’, Mack, a young single parent, family friend, and employee at the skating rink.

Jonah’s trajectory is completely the opposite. He is an up and coming young speed skater, whose father has booked exclusive ice time at the rink for him every day. He is the same age as Olivia, and attending the same school, though he is very much just putting in the time so as not to get into trouble – he is entirely focused on skating, and schoolwork is irrelevant to him. His parents are also very involved in his life. His father is his coach, whereas his mother is determined to insert some normality into his existence at any cost.

For both Olivia and Jonah, skating is the centre of their lives, though at the start of the book this is something that Olivia doesn’t want to admit to herself – with her career ostensibly over, she is trying to live like a normal person. But she has never really learned how to be normal, and with Jonah around to remind her of what it’s like to be constantly focused on an athletic goal, she isn’t sure she wants to be. This tension between being ‘normal’ and following an athletic career at a very young age is one of the main themes of the book, and it’s explored from a variety of angles. Here’s Olivia, just after her first proper skating practice after deciding to start skating more seriously again.

It’s after nine before I rollerblade home. I’m not quiet when I pass behind the couch Mom is snoring away on. Some sick part of me wishes Mom were waiting up for me, demanding to know where I’ve been and with whom for the last six hours. That she would threaten to ground me for such dangerous behavior. But I don’t have a normal mother. And I am not a normal teen. A normal teen doesn’t bust her ass falling out of a triple salchow, get up, and repeat it twenty-three more times. I pull down the waistband of my leggings. The bruising has already started. The constant bruising high-level skaters have. The bruising that earns you a visit from CPS after a routine visit to the pediatrician. The bruising that is hard for a scared seven-year-old to explain to the CPS lady who makes your parents stay away from you for a little while. The bruising that some sick part of you actually likes because it means your double salchow is about to become a triple salchow if you’ve got the guts to push through the pain. If you get off your ass and take it back.

The book starts off feeling like a fun, light, teen romance centred around competitive ice skating, and it does a lot of things very well. Number one on this list was the skating. I loved all the details about how skating works, and about how being an athlete works, the way that Olivia just takes it for granted that when she is eating she is thinking in the back of her mind about how many carbs she can have, or that she will usually be in pain from all the falls after skating practice (at one point she and Jonah compare their treatment regimens – frozen peas, Tiger Balm, and moleskin for the blisters, with duct tape as back up). There is a very sweet scene later in the book where Jonah misses Flower Day at school, but makes up for it by giving Olivia moleskin, a little pot of Tiger Balm and a pair of red skate guards. And Olivia gets Jonah into pairs skating as a form of cross-training, and it is just adorable.

“You’re pretty good at this.” Jonah smiles at me.

“Wanna switch sports?”

“Boy, please.” When I stand up, Jonah does too. “Besides, I can actually get lower than you do in the lean.”

“Not with those skates.”

“Watch me,” I say, and Jonah comes to a stop.

I flip around and do a few backward crossovers until I build up enough momentum. I squat down and lean into a hydroblade on my backward inside edge, stretching lower and lower to the ice until I look like a perfect 4 on its side. I reach my arms out and let the tips of my fingers graze the ice as I loop in tighter and tighter spirals.

“Wooooow,” Jonah says when I come back up.

I curtsey. “Want to try it together?”

“Speed skates aren’t really designed to go backwards.”

“You don’t have to. Just lean like you normally do, then hold it and try to sink lower instead of coming back up. Watch.” I grab Jonah’s outside hand and pull him into motion.

This time as we come into the curve, Jonah and I act as counterbalances to each other. Neither of us go very low, but as our spiral gets tighter, our smiles get bigger. We stumble a little getting back up, but otherwise . . .

“That was awesome,” Jonah says, without releasing my hand. “Can we do it again?”

I don’t release his hand either. “Of course. We definitely can do better.”

I really loved everything about Jonah and Olivia’s relationship. It develops quietly and steadily, and is full of affection and heat and humour (and embarrassing interruptions by parents at awkward moments). Their relationship is rooted in a bone-deep understanding of each other’s lives, and an acceptance that sometimes they will have to miss important things in each other’s lives because of their careers, and that this is no reflection on how they feel about each other. They share a drive to succeed, and so while it hurts when one of them has to bail on an important commitment, it’s just part of the package of loving someone who is an elite athlete. The trick is to avoid letting each other down in ways that you can help, rather than stressing over the times when letting each other down is inevitable. I also like the way the book interrogates this, and asks the question of whether there is a way to be a top skater while also following Rule Number One of Pairs Skating – always look after your partner.

The secondary characters are also great. The story is set in Phoenix, and the school is mostly white, but there is a group of Asian kids who Jonah and Olivia hang out with (Olivia is half Japanese, and Jonah is three-quarters Korean). I liked the way the group accepts them, even though they really don’t get the world Jonah and Olivia live in.

“Hey guys, bad news,” I say after texting my answer to Egg. “I’m going to have to bail on the dance.”

“What?” Naomi and Erika shriek in tandem.

“Why?” Brandon says.

“I have a skating thing this weekend.”

Erika genuinely looks annoyed at my announcement. “It can’t wait until next week? This is a once-a-year event, you know.”

Jonah and I share an are-they-for-real look.

“No. Egg and I have been partners since I was ten years old. I’m the only one who can help him with it.”

Naomi throws down her katsu sandwich. “Well, this totally wrecks all our plans.”

“Really. It’s fine.” As always, Jonah is the only one who gets it. “Nobody wants to see me dance anyway.”

The other three people at our table look at Jonah like he’s from another planet.

“I’m sorry,” I say more to Jonah than anybody else, and he shrugs.

“I’ll take a rain check.” Jonah puts his hand on my knee and squeezes it. “It’s one dance. Who cares?”

“Unbelievable.” Erika shakes her head. “You two are so weird.”

Naomi elbows her cousin. “Not weird. Dedicated. Very dedicated.”

“Well, I hope you two won’t look back on your high school life one day and regret it. You only get to do this once.”

“Thank God,” Jonah says. “I can’t wait to finish high school. I would skate full-time tomorrow if my parents would let me take the GED test and be done.”

The GED? Erika’s and Naomi’s heads look ready to explode.

“I guess we have different priorities.” Erika’s voice matches Jonah’s.

“Yeah, we do.”

Jonah’s mother is also fantastic – she is delighted by Olivia’s presence in Jonah’s life and is thoroughly embarrassing in the way that only a very loving, over-involved parent can be. And speaking of parental figures, I want to mention Mack again, because she’s not your typical teen mother secondary character. She’s a former valedictorian who was planning to go to Stanford and become an engineer before her life got derailed on several fronts, and she wound up pregnant and living with her grandmother. She has complicated relationships with her family and with her baby’s father that we only see the periphery of, because Olivia is the sole narrator and she’s absorbed in her own drama. Mack is really into roller derby, and trains with both Olivia and Jonah, hoping to make the local team. And she’s adopted family to Olivia – she seems to be closer to both Olivia and her mother than they are to each other, and uses that closeness to try to help them both.

In fact, all the secondary characters have more going on than Olivia is inclined to focus on. It’s not an ensemble cast, by any means, but there is a definite sense that this world extends beyond the pages of the book, and that you could tell a different, but equally compelling, story about nearly any of them. (Egg, Olivia’s former partner, would be a particularly interesting case, in fact – he becomes a fairly key player in the story, but his motivations and feelings are more opaque to Olivia than she entirely realises, and there are clearly things going on in his life that she just doesn’t see, or pay attention to).

I also adored the humour in this book. I know I’ve already included three quotes here, but I just can’t resist including this one because I am always ready for a physics-related pun.

Egg turns to me. “You’ve gained weight. Your body feels different.”

I punch Egg in the arm, even though he’s right.

“What? You’ve always complained about your flat butt. Now you got a booty. Embrace your new curves.”

Everybody suddenly looks at my butt. I take off my jacket and wrap it around my waist. Jonah unlaces his skates and slips them off. He puts them on the table next to mine. “Teach me the lift.”

Egg scoffs. “Dude, you can’t lift her.”

And in stupid boy code, that becomes a challenge. Jonah leans over and scoops me up. You know, this would be kind of a romantic moment if my ass weren’t made of lead, and Egg and Mack weren’t here.

“She’s not a barbell. You’re not going to be able to get her above your head like that,” Egg says.

Which, of course, guarantees that Jonah is going to try. It’s a good thing Mack comes out from under the table just in time to break my fall.

“Whoa! Knock it off before you two boneheads hurt Olivia.” Mack gives me a hand off the floor. “Dude, it’s simple physics. F equals MA.”

“Huh?” Jonah says.

“Newton’s Second Law. Force equals mass times acceleration,” Mack says like everybody knows this. When we give her blank looks, she adds, “Show him. Press lift.”

I step back a few paces. When Egg gives the signal, I jog up to him. I lace my fingers through his. Egg presses up as I push off the floor until I am suspended above his head. I spread my legs out into a modest V as Egg rotates slowly. My muscles quiver a bit, but overall, this feels right. This feels like me. This is my normal.

“Olivia’s jog brings the acceleration into the equation. Her momentum, plus Egg’s strength overcomes the drag of Olivia’s ass . . . I mean, mass . . . to force her up into the air. F equals MA. Newton’s Second Law.”

Egg gives me the signal. We gently collapse back down until my Chucks touch the ground.

But here’s the thing. I went into this book expecting to love it, and indeed I did love the first half of the book. But then it just started getting more and more bleak and filled with angst, and I found it really hard going.

We learn early in the book that Olivia’s family is short of money – her mother, Midori, suffered a career-ending injury ten years ago and requires ongoing and expensive treatments, and so Olivia’s father, Michael, is on the exhibition skating circuit to keep them all afloat. Meanwhile, Midori is doing her best to run the rink, but is increasingly hampered by the chronic pain from her injuries, and as the book progresses, Olivia is taking on more and more of the work of running the rink and the household.

Over the course of the book, these problems become more foregrounded – the bills start piling up, there is no food in the house, and later in the book we see that Olivia is now on the school lunch program. This is all mentioned in passing, but the picture is increasingly grim. Midori is becoming more reliant on medication to manage her chronic pain, and with Olivia’s father still away, Olivia falls increasingly into a caretaker role.

Olivia is a smart, strong, independent person, and she does a good job of looking after her mother and juggling everything else, but it’s not a fair burden to put on her, especially when she survives a terrifying situation and just needs a parent who is present and able to let her be a child. I’m putting this behind a cut for both spoiler and trigger warning reasons, because I found it extremely shocking and upsetting, even though everyone survived.

Trigger warning: Threat of gun violence.

One of the turning points in the book is when Olivia and Jonah’s school goes into lockdown, with what appears to be an active shooter situation. The students are all hiding in their classroom, and they can hear the intruder testing the locks. And while the other kids are texting their parents and getting anxious responses, Olivia gets nothing. Even when the event is over and the other parents get to pick their kids up, nobody comes for Olivia, and after three quarters of an hour, she gets tired of waiting and makes her own way back to the rink and to Mack. When she gets home, her mother is completely unaware of the situation and too out of it to talk to Olivia anyway, and it is only late in the evening when her father sees Olivia’s messages and calls back, by which time Olivia doesn’t feel like talking.

This is pretty shattering for Olivia, but I’ll confess, I was kind of staggered by the entire passage. I don’t know if that’s a cultural difference between Australia and the US, and if lockdowns feel more like a scary-but-normal thing to American readers, but it was profoundly shocking and upsetting to me to find one in the middle of a YA romance novel. And it seemed… weirdly normalised in the way it was handled? I mean, maybe it’s the aforementioned cultural difference, but I felt like I was more upset about the lockdown than most of the characters were a few days after the event. On reflection, I wonder if that scene even needed to be there. The absent nature of Olivia’s parents was pretty clear even without it, though that was certainly a very dramatic example – I think it’s the first time Olivia gets a really immediate comparison of how normal parents react to a significant event in their children’s lives (Jonah’s parents don’t really count as normal here, because Jonah’s skating career already changes that dynamic).

Another source of angst is that just when Olivia is beginning to think she has a future in skating after all, she learns that her parents are planning to sell the rink. This would make practicing at the level she would require unaffordable, and derail any possibility of a skating career for her. Her parents refuse to listen to her (and also make it clear that they didn’t think she was really good enough at skating anyway) because she is a child and this is a financial decision that needs to be made by adults. This felt cruel on so many levels – given how much Olivia has been doing to keep the rink and the household running in the absence of her father and the incapacity of her mother, it seemed particularly unjust that they suddenly decided to treat her as a child who should have no say in the decisions they made about the rink and about her future. I’m not saying that Olivia was a paragon of maturity – far from it – but it just seemed like a really unfair situation to put her in.

I found this section desperately hard to read – it really evoked the helplessness of being a teenager with hopes and plans which require the cooperation of adults who refuse to understand or recognise those hopes and plans. It’s especially hard for Olivia because the career of an athlete is so short that losing the opportunity to skate for two or three years now is going to absolutely put her out of the running by the time she is old enough to manage her finances and her life.

And… that’s not even the sum total of all the stressful, painful, difficult things that happened in the second half of the book. I don’t know if these things would impact another reader the way they did me, but I went from having a wonderful time reading to feeling pretty profoundly miserable and stressed.

I was also a little uneasy about how Olivia’s mother, Midori, was portrayed. On the one hand, she definitely had her health ups and downs during the book, and she did better at parenting when her chronic pain issues were less severe, but even then, Olivia seemed to have a lot more responsibility for herself and the household and the rink than seemed appropriate for a child of her age. There is so much stigma around chronic pain patients, and I wish the story had not made the one character in this book with a disability such a terrible parent. Midori couldn’t help the fact that she wasn’t always able physically to look after Olivia (and I have Feelings about the absence of Olivia’s father through so much of this book), but she could at least have been less actively emotionally unsupportive.

Despite all of this angst, the ending is positive and hopeful. Everything is resolved, and we have a pathway toward a future that allows Jonah and Olivia to be the athletes they need to be while still having some semblance of normality in their lives. But we only get there in the last few pages, and it gets pretty dark before that point. In fact, I felt like the Dark Moment lasted for a good third of the book, which is too much. Now, some of this may be just my reaction – while I am the furthest thing imaginable from an athlete, some of the interactions between Olivia and her family in the second half of the book hit very close to home, and it’s hard to gauge whether someone else would find them as upsetting as I did. But I think there was a fair bit of objectively distressing stuff crammed into the latter part of the book, and the upturn happened very late.

I really have no idea how to grade Every Reason We Shouldn’t. It’s a satisfying, sweet romance between two young people who really are just right for each other, and I never want to read it again. It’s extremely well-written, but that only made it more painful to read. While I love the ending, I don’t think I could bear the journey a second time.

Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t prepared for the angst – it creeps up on you so slowly, and then suddenly you look around you and realise that you are neck deep in despair. I do think it’s a really good book; it’s just not a good book for me.

I think if I were talking about this book to a friend, I would say I thought it was really good but it pressed my buttons to a point where I can’t judge it objectively. I’d say that the angst levels are pretty high and if you have a messy family background you should probably run away fast in the opposite direction. But I would also say that I loved the ice skating, that I loved the characters and the relationships between them – the dynamics, both good and bad, were exquisitely well-drawn. And the central relationship was sweet and solid when it counted, which matters a lot.

I’m inclined to land on a B for this. If you like your romances with plenty of real world angst, I think you will love it. But for me, it just hurt a bit too much.

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Every Reason We Shouldn’t by Sara Fujimura

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  1. Kareni says:

    Thank you for your thoughtful review, Catherine. I enjoyed hearing what worked for you as well as where the book challenged you.

  2. Qualisign says:

    This review was precisely what I needed to read today. Triggers *are* triggery. My triggers are not necessarily your triggers. Authors can write beautifully and still leave a [triggered] reader unsettled. Thank you, Catherine Heloise, for the care you took to situate yourself in relation to the review. Like Kareni, I really appreciated your thoughtful review, for the reminder that not every book works for every person, and that books that don’t work for a specific reader still may be well written.

  3. flchen1 says:

    Thank you for such an excellent review, Catherine. I’m so torn! This sounds excellent on a lot of levels, and I love the idea of so much positive representation overall, but I so appreciate the warning of all the darkness in that portion of the book. I will have to see if it’s available at the library or something and give it a try… Thank you!

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