This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Isabelle. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.

Here is Isabelle's review:

While sports romance isn’t my preferred subgenre, I jumped at the chance to read “Wild in Rio” by Lyssa Kay Adams. A romance set at the Olympics? I adore the Olympics!

An aside: have you ever had a deep realization that arrived about 20 years later than it should have? Here’s one of mine. Growing up, the only sports I eagerly watched on television were tennis and the Olympics, and I still love them both. Why just these two? It didn’t occur to me until I was watching the 2016 Summer Games. Where else could I reliably see women kicking ass at sports on TV when I was a kid? You’ve heard it before, and I’ll say it again: representation matters.

Back to “Wild in Rio.” By way of synopsis, this novella, like my aforementioned epiphany, takes place during the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The prologue happens two years prior in an Irish park, with a brief but memorable chance meeting of our hero Padraig, a rough-and-tumble Irish boxer, and our heroine Ever, a wealthy American equestrian. Little did they know they were both Olympic-caliber athletes who would reunite in Rio. And little did they know that fortnight would be their time for emotions far stronger than just the fabled joy of victory and agony of defeat.

If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to approach this book like an Olympic judge and examine the different facets: the artistry, the level of difficulty, and the execution. I think of artistry as the set of stylistic choices the author used. For example, she wrote the book in present tense, which, I’ll be honest, just grates on me. Marks off from the picky American judge.

She also used first person narration, shifting between the hero and heroine’s point of view, another artistic choice I don’t personally prefer in romance. Successful romance requires a delicate balance between internal struggles and external action. This book faltered with the depiction of external action. Some Big Things (one might even say Olympic Things) happen to our characters near the end of the book. Because of the shifting point of view, the reader simply isn’t there to witness them or understand how the character involved feels. We only find out what happens secondhand, through the other point of view. What a wasted opportunity. To really empathize with a character, I want to go through their most devastating and triumphant moments with them.

So let’s talk tropes, those familiar stylistic choices that can really help you know whether you’re likely to enjoy a romance. This book may be for you if you dig the following tropes:

• Love at first sight. That chance meeting in the park was fateful, y’all.
• A bad boy/ good girl match up. But only a little. It’s got more of a poor boy/rich girl vibe.
• Relatedly, a rich girl with terrible rich parents who is yearning to breathe free.
• Meaningful slow dancing. (Guilty as charged! No wonder I’m more of a historical girl.)
• Horses as a prelude to sex. (It really is a trope, don’t you think?)
• Fingerbanging on public transit. (OK, I’ll admit that’s not really a trope.)

So how about level of difficulty? I always think writing good romance is tremendously difficult, and writing a potent short romance seems extra challenging. The length necessitates condensing both character development and plotting. Indeed, our hero and heroine fall in love at breakneck speed, a pace that never felt authentic or earned to me. Moreover, a short novella can mean sacrificing world building and side plots, which is a shame. How I would have loved to have seen more of Rio, more of the Games, more of the international cast of characters who could have provided fun opportunities to reveal the rich, quirky details of Padraig and Ever and their relationship. Also, because I’m an Olympics nerd, I genuinely would have liked some insight into boxing and equestrian events, which I didn’t get.

Instead, if this romance were caught on film, it would be mostly tight shots of our hero and heroine. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as that hyperfocus packs some emotional wallop. In a satisfying romance, the couple needs to emerge from a Dark Time, the True Test of whether the hero and heroine can put to use what they’ve each learned about themselves through their relationship. The Dark Time in this book, which stemmed largely from the poor/rich dynamic, seemed ultimately quite trivial. I mean, I feel you, Padraig, I hate rich people too, but it’s really not that hard to make an exception. In the end, I didn’t sense real growth from either Padraig or Ever.

Onto execution. As far as I can tell, this book is self-published, and I found some editing issues that were frankly distracting. Most notably, Padraig’s Irish brogue seemed questionably executed and inconsistently applied. Don’t get me wrong; I love me a brogue. But do I want his speech to be written in dialect? Reasonable people can disagree, but I find too much dialect can send me to a Lucky Charms leprechaun place in my head, which is decidedly not sexy. (See also: Scottish burrs and Groundskeeper Willie.)

Ultimately, execution comes down to answering some fundamental questions: are the main characters compelling people individually, do they have an unmistakable chemistry together, and do they fight for their happy ending? It’s not a screaming “no” across the board from me, it’s more like “eeeehhhh, not really.”

To keep this extended metaphor going, this book did not receive high enough marks to medal at my Romance Olympics. But like many of my favorite Olympic events, the judging is subjective. If you are more tolerant of romances where the love comes easily, where the author doesn’t really torture her characters before giving them that HEA, and where there’s plenty o’ feckin’, this might be a book for you.