Thank you NetGalley and The Dial press for the opportunity to read this book. This book just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t get past all the basketball details to enjoy the characters. I never made a connection with this story. I’m sure it will appeal to others - just not me. I’m glad I gave it a shot.

This was lovely. It's a coming-of-age story about a basketball player coming to terms with her sexuality and navigating the crush she feels for one of her teammates and close friends. It's set in a small town, so this character is hesitant to accept the reality of what she feels because she experiences homophobia and close-mindedness.

There's a lot of longing, drama, and big feelings, and it touches on themes like grief, self-discovery, and a search for purpose. These teenagers felt very real, and the way they navigated things and behaved was very easy to believe. Overall, a great coming-of-age story, very moving at times.

A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane is beautifully written, with lyrical prose that really captures the weight of longing and grief. While the emotional depth is powerful, the pacing felt a bit slow at times, making it harder to stay fully engaged. It’s a meaningful read if you’re in the mood for something introspective and poetic, but it might not click for everyone.

I didn't know much about this book going in to it and I felt pretty mixed -- I liked the writing and I really enjoyed parts of it but it felt pretty uneven and I did not care for the ending.

This book grapples with a lot of really big and important topics, not only for teenagers but for everyone -- figuring out who you are, loss of a parent, planning for the future. I felt like it tackled those issues really well and thoughtfully.

I enjoyed the writing enough that I will read more by Marisa Crane in the future! And I am so happy that stories like this are out there for the teenagers that can relate to them -- it is so important and I will always support them being published and popular!

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book!

A Sharp Endless Need is SO, so, so, so good. Heartbreaking and tender and hopeful and raw. I loved this so much it hurt.

After really enjoying the author’s last book, I was excited to read her latest!

There were a lot of things I liked about this book and a lot of things that didn’t work for me. I found the writing to be good yet the pacing was challenging for me. With so much basketball talk, I found myself spacing out for sections. If you haven’t played basketball, it’s not super easy to follow for those pieces.

I loved the coming of age theme of this book but wanted a bit more from pieces. And what was that ending?! The ending actually made it lose a star. I don’t like super ambiguous endings and it just didn’t work for me. I left with too many questions.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

I was unable to finish this book as I found the writing a bit too sophmoric. I was not able to connect with the characters due to the writing style. I do not typically read YA and this book felt very young adult to me in the narration and plotting.

i’m blown away at how a sharp endless need not only grabbed my attention, but had me root for our cast characters.

firstly, thank you to the publisher for an arc!

wow, never would i have ever thought i would read and enjoy a book about women’s basketball, EVER! especially considering i care very little for sports.

but a sharp endless need is not just about high school basketball, it’s so much more: losing a parent suddenly and unraveling secrets from their past, the toxic yet functional bond between teammates, being queer in a small, suffocating town, abusing drugs and alcohol as a young person, as well as the uncertainty of the future in many capacities (deciding what team to play college sports for, what it means to be queer in the early 2000s, and how injuries disrupt the plans for the future).

overall i’m blown away at how a sharp endless need not only grabbed my attention, but had me root for our cast characters.

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for this advance copy!

A Sharp Endless Need is an incredible story of Mack, a high school basketball phenom and her world as she spirals towards making the jump from high school to college. She meets Liv and they start a winding path filled with drugs, sex, and, of course, basketball. Navigating her feelings for Liv and her family's past, she moves frantically from one situation to the next.

This story was tough for me to read, mostly because you see Liv and Mack's potential and you see their youth and its just hard to watch them squander it all with no look to the future. But Crane's writing is superb in this, and she conveys Liv and Mack as fully formed characters, flaws and all. A beautifully written novel.

This was a case of wrong reader - I think coming of age stories are not working for me and I should stop trying them. I appreciate the Philly area setting - always here for a good Wawa reference! But this one wasn’t for me and I decided to dnf.

What an absolutely heart breaking, poignant coming of age novel. A Sharp Endless Need dives deep into the mind of Mack and all-star high school basketball player destined for greatness. Her newest teammate, Liv, is her perfect match on the court and off the court she’s Mack’s everything. In a time and place where being queer was unacceptable we find the destructive ways the outside world really blow up Mack’s life and her own self-destructing things she does in order to avoid feelings. This novel was so well written, and as a huge women’s basketball fan I was into it from the beginning. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for this eARC.

A Sharp Endless Need is the kind of coming-of-age literary fiction I love to read: vibrant, bright and brimming with emotion, poignant without feeling overwrought, and featuring characters so real and so sympathetic that the pages practically vibrate with their energy.

Mack is reeling from the loss of her beloved father when she meets Liv, a recent transfer to her school and a new teammate on the varsity girls’ basketball team. Mack is a highly scouted D-1 prospect, and there are few players who can match her skill on the court – but Liv does. And it soon becomes clear that Mack and Liv have just as much chemistry off the court as they do on it.

I happen to love basketball, but that’s not at all a requirement for enjoying A Sharp Endless Need. The way Marisa Crane brings the game to life with their prose is so engaging, conveying the frenetic pace, the passion it inspires in its players, and the strong bonds forged among teammates in such a high pressure environment. But even though basketball is so central to the plot, it’s not really what this book is about. This is the story of a teenager who is struggling: with her grief, with her sexuality and gender identity, with the looming decisions she has to make about her future. She is consumed by sadness, by complex feelings of longing and desire, and by indecision. Mack tells her story from the perspective of an adult looking back on that time in her life, so there’s an element of nostalgia and vulnerability to the telling – an inherent gentleness in the way she treats her younger self and the younger version of Liv. The book is set in the early 2000s, when I was in high school myself, so that just added to the nostalgia for me.

A Sharp Endless Need is very specifically a teen lesbian basketball romance, but its themes are universal: self-discovery, grief and acceptance, first love, complex family dynamics. Crane hits on something incredibly true in this story, and I’ll be thinking about it – especially the bittersweet ending – for a long time. Thank you to The Dial Press for the complimentary reading opportunity.

(4.5 Stars)

I just knew from the opening passages that this was really gonna land for me, and I was right, because I was just swept up in this story’s momentum from start to finish.

There’s a magnetism and an urgency to the writing, especially because of where the characters are in their lives. There’s uncertainty, there’s fear, there’s this desperation the characters feel to both just be enough and also transcend above what they’ve been allowed to be up to this point.

Basketball, as both a plot point and a metaphor, is such a beautiful vehicle for this story to explore all of those things. It’s really successful as a driving force behind the story, as an element that allows the story to hang together, because without it, I think the story would feel much more meandering and perhaps even pointless. And again, the sport is just a really effective framing device, because it’s a game that’s as much about luck as it is about skill. It’s a game that doesn’t always love its players back, it’s an unforgiving game where one mistake or one injury can leave you with nothing. And the story does a great job of exploring who the characters truly are both with and without the sport.

And at the end of the day, I feel like this story is really about what it means to hunger not just for success, but for validation. In what ways do we define ourselves and in what ways do we allow ourselves to be defined by the people in our lives, the things we allow our identity to become tied up in, and our circumstances? And in trying to find those answers and navigate those questions, the characters don’t always turn to the right things. They don’t always make the right choices. They set themselves up for failure or even punish themselves because they don’t know what the right thing is. And I appreciate the story for giving them that agency and that space.

Something I don’t want to forget to touch on is the fact that the story is also using basketball as a means to explore gender and the stereotypical relationship between female athletes and masculinity. That’s a really big topic that, frankly, I don’t have the time or energy or language to unpack in this moment. But a lot of female athletes are assigned markers of masculinity in order to quote-unquote “justify” their relationship to sport, or they’re expected to exchange their femininity for credibility in order to be respected accepted in the world of sports. And, of course, female athletes are no more or less feminine simply *because* they play sports, but that’s still a power dynamic at play when it comes to athletic spaces.

And the stereotype actually works out in Mack’s favor, in this case, because she’s afforded that ambiguity, she’s allowed to explore her masculinity and her relationship to gender because she exists in that liminal space—which is another reason why she’s so obsessively devoted to the sport, even if she can’t name it.

I also think it’s important to keep in mind that this is uncontestedly adult fiction. It is about teenagers and it’s a really powerful coming-of-age narrative, but it’s told from an adult perspective and it’s written for adults. That said, though, I think this definitely has crossover potential—no pun intended—because if you read a lot of YA or you’re part of the YA demographic but you’re looking for something a bit more mature, something to transition you to adult fiction, this could be a great choice.

I think it’s obvious that I had a great time with this. Dani Martineck also truly made a *meal* of the audiobook. The way they express heartache and desperation was so incredibly believable. You just feel their performance deep in your bones. This is definitely a new favorite and I think I would give it four-and-a-half stars.

I love women's sports and so I was very excited for a queer sports literary romance/coming of age story! I really enjoyed this and felt that the longing between Liv & Mack was so visceral and engaging. I also loved the basketball details and how it showed the pressure put on student athletes and exposes the gritty side of college sports and the impact they have. While the book did work for me, I do feel like the amount of detail about basketball will turn off some readers who are not into sports.

While I think that the representation this book has is super important, I didn’t really love reading something so sexually graphic about 17 year olds. I do think that the coming of age in a midsize town, especially when you’re not straight, can be a really hard experience, and this book did a great job showing what that experience can look like. The addition of elite level basketball and adding in the recruiting process really added to the story, as well as Liv and Mack’s relationship. Overall, I would recommend, since I think the story it tells is very well-written and worth reading.

Thank you to Dial Press and Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I have to admit, this book was a slog to get through.

After the death of her father Mack Morris finds herself drawn to new student t Liv Cooper. Basketball players, they just click on the court, but away from the games they find themselves tangled together in a sort-of romance...

I'm not sure if it was the characters, plot or writing style but I really had to struggle to finish this one. Just did NOT work for me at all.

Queer basketball love in a small town.

Poetic but not pretentious, heavy and raw, slow and quiet. This writing style often works for me but in this case I think it just didn't resonate personally. A Sharp Endless Need offers a deep dive into themes of love, loss, and identity. However, its introspective style and pacing may not appeal to everyone. If you're drawn to character-driven stories with a nostalgic 2000s setting, it might be worth a read. For me, though, it didn't quite hit the mark.

Ended up not finishing this. Dnf at 21%. Read too many teenage coming of age stories recently and this just fell flat. Although if you love basketball and have a parental death to process this would be a good read for you.

A poignant sharp tongued coming of age novel about a young queer basketball star. It’s sort of like the gapers delay when there’s a wreck on the highway. Slow moving, meandering, ill advised but that moment when you see with stunning clarity how quickly things can go wrong and you drive just a little more carefully on the way home. A story about the terror of potential, what does it mean? What if you can’t live up to it? What if the heights you’ve imagined are out of reach? Controlled chaos, daily doses of self destruction and a deep hunger characterize our protagonist, Mack. As I close the book I already miss her, and I will be thinking of her for quite some time.