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A review by nthnrgb
Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler
4.0
This book is literally everything cliched, in the best way. It's quarterback-meets-cheerleader, except the quarterback is a woman. I don't know how, but Adler manages to keep the tone fun and sweet while still having very serious conversations about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a woman in a male environment, and what it means to be a woman who loves other women. The book goes back and forth between Jack (the quarterback) and Amber's (the cheerleader) POVs, as Jack deals with being the new transfer onto a team where their last quarterback died in a car crash, so she's dealing with the misogyny of being a woman in a male space as well as trying to live up to a dead man (that many characters are putting up on a pedestal, even though he wasn't... the best person). Amber is really focused on becoming captain of the cheerleaders and decides that uniting the cheerleaders and football team behind Jack is a way of showing her leadership skills, but her team isn't having that. Overall, the book is a super sweet and cheerful read that still manages to hold important and serious conversations.
Potential cons:
- Genuinely forgot which POV I was reading a few times. The writing style of each girl is very similar, like down to their voices, so there would be times that I was reading where I didn't remember which POV I was in and, since I was reading on my ereader, I couldn't flip back to the beginning of the chapter to see which it was.
- The "climax" was a little lack luster. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it but I really thought it was going to be a much bigger thing and in some ways, it kind of felt rushed, as if the author was hitting a word/page limit and didn't get to go into it as much as they originally wanted.
What I liked
- The cliche of it all. I love taking (in my opinion) overdone heterosexual tropes and making them queer. It just brings me such joy and the way this trope was done with such love and kindness and joy. Ugh, I loved it.
- It was a super easy read. I read this in a few hours on a train in the early morning, and I felt like I just fell right into the world and didn't really get bored or overwhelmed by reading it all in one sitting.
Potential cons:
- Genuinely forgot which POV I was reading a few times. The writing style of each girl is very similar, like down to their voices, so there would be times that I was reading where I didn't remember which POV I was in and, since I was reading on my ereader, I couldn't flip back to the beginning of the chapter to see which it was.
- The "climax" was a little lack luster. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it but I really thought it was going to be a much bigger thing and in some ways, it kind of felt rushed, as if the author was hitting a word/page limit and didn't get to go into it as much as they originally wanted.
What I liked
- The cliche of it all. I love taking (in my opinion) overdone heterosexual tropes and making them queer. It just brings me such joy and the way this trope was done with such love and kindness and joy. Ugh, I loved it.
- It was a super easy read. I read this in a few hours on a train in the early morning, and I felt like I just fell right into the world and didn't really get bored or overwhelmed by reading it all in one sitting.