Pefect for fans of Love and Basketball' and for those who loved 'Lie with me' by Philippe Besson. This book is heartbreakingly amazing. I loved how slow burn this book was and how GAY it was. I'd never read a lesbian love story and I'm kicking myself Mack and Liv were realized characters who felt real. The ending, broke my heart but I understand why it was done. But, my goodness Marisa Crane—you've done an amazing job!

A Sharp Endless Need is a poignant and brutally nostalgic coming-of-age novel that expertly explores the intersections of elite athletics, queerness, and drugs in early 2000s middle America. It is the type of book that sinks its claws immediately into your jugular and refuses to let up until you’ve finished every last word. Fans of Sirens & Muses, and Rana Joon and the One and Only Now, you are in the right place.

Mackenzie, “Mak”, now an adult, recalling the story of her adolescence is the lens through which we experience this story. A high school senior on track to go D1 in college for basketball, Mak has never experienced anything casually. She’s addicted to the high of the game, roaring fans, and immortality of the jersey. But when her dad, and biggest supporter, dies unexpectedly, she is unsure if she’ll ever be able to play properly again. That is, until she meets Liv, a transfer student whose skills rival hers. On the court, the duo is magic, sensing each other’s moves before they happen and carrying their team to repeated victories. But off the court, there is something more between them. A feeling they refuse to name that keeps them glued to each other, for better or worse. It helps that they can barely see anything through the haze of drugs and alcohol they keep in constant supply. Mak claims it’s the only time she feels right with herself off the basketball court, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say weed made me happy to be alive, but it made me happy despite being alive,” and it’s not like anybody is going to tell her no, she’s a star.

Mak’s intensity, queerness, and perfectionism are the bread and butter of this novel. Although the word “lesbian” is not mentioned, the actions of Mak speak louder than her words, a common theme of this book. Her sexuality and chemistry with Liv are the focal points, intertwining in a homoerotic friendship many know too well. Despite Liv’s cishet “roman god” boyfriend, she maintains an intimacy and “will they won’t they” back and forth with Mak throughout the novel. But Mak is also in a constant fight with herself and her desires. She desires to be a D1 basketball star, and it devours her. She desires to be with Liv, and it devours her. She desires to escape her reality, and it devours her. Mak sums this up perfectly: “How was I expected to explain to this stranger that the more I desired, the more those desires emptied me? That if I could be anyone else, I would.” This is soul-crushing, but in a way that is so excruciatingly relatable to anyone who has ever wanted something so bad you ruined yourself to get it.

Which is what this book does so excellently, it reopens the nostalgia wound, releasing waves of emotional devastation in a way that makes you want to read it over and over again. The setting of the early 2000s is what cements that feeling. Not having social media or an iPhone gives a rawness to the story and forces the characters to experience life as it is happening. They IM and text as a means to an end, but it’s not the entirety of a relationship. They pick up drugs from a local dealer, they watch VHS tapes, and they share cell phones with their parents. It’s so earnest that the insincerity of modern technology would taint the perfectly crafted vibe.

Crane’s character writing and style are the true stars of this novel, though. Enabling the reader to feel they are experiencing the events as a teenager while reminiscing as an adult. Mak is a character everyone can see themselves in, but wishes they couldn’t. She is the embodiment of teenage angst. From not caring about what her body feels like in the future as long as she gets to use it now, to stuffing her face with drugs, to the homoerotic friendship all too many queer people have experienced. She doesn’t know anything about the world or adulthood, yet believes she has everything set and avoids realities that might affect that view. It hurts to read her screw herself over and over again and listen to how she thinks, “I didn’t necessarily care about attracting boys, but I did want to feel attractive to anyone who happened to be looking at me.” She manages to self-destruct and view herself as a god on the same page, and it wrecks the reader in the best way. The writing itself is the knife twist, too. Crane can shape scenes and thoughts that are unique but universally relatable. I wasn’t a D1 athlete in school, yet so much of Mak mirrors my life, and I’m sure the same is true with people who’ve read this. Crane weaves in precise social commentary while maintaining the coherence of the moment in a way unparalleled by any other author.

All in all, this maudlin character study is a must-read. From the unrequited love to the precocious coping mechanisms, you won’t be able to put this book down. Not to mention being unable to think about anything else for hours afterward. If you love crying while reading and the early 2000s, you are in the right place. Happy reading!

The writing was great, but I did not care for the story. I tried to read it physically and via audio but I couldn’t get into it. Also the time jumps were a little confusing. I got to a total of 25% read before i decided to officially put it down. I am willing to try something else for the author in the future!

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the ARC!

I went into this one blind - this book was sent to me by the publisher and I hadn't read the description. All you need to know is the writing is incredible and the way in which the story is told is captivating. I am thrilled to have been able to have read this one, and I can't wait to check out more from this author in the future.

Thank you again for the ARC!

I was hooked from the beginning!!
It was amazing and engaging.
I was instantly sucked in by the atmosphere and writing style.
The characters were all very well developed .
The writing is exceptional and I was hooked after the first sentence.

What a fantastic story of discovery, longing, and figuring out who you are as a queer person in a small town in the 2000s

Mack as our narrator is fantastic. She is trying to figure out her future in relationship to basketball and self identity after the loss of her father. She continues to struggle throughout the novel, as many queer people do, and the author did a fantastic job showcasing all of the struggles of a young adult. I wanted to keep rooting for her, but her story was almost 2 steps forward, 1 gigantic step back by her own self sabotage.

Liv as a new foil for Mack really kicked everything into high gear. She wasn’t one who was in a space to investigate her identity, and it was always heartbreaking to see from Mack’s eyes. However, a very realistic portrayal of discovery for many queer youth.

While typically a true romcom girlie, this was a poignant break from that, and I truly enjoy the writing style!

Thanks to The Dial Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

A Sharp Endless Need is a propulsive, character driven novel about basketball, desire, and sexuality set in early 2000s rural Pennsylvania.

“ We wanted to live forever. Who could blame us? We wanted to live ball in hand, ball against backboard, ball licking the bottom of the net. We wanted to be in history books. For what? We didn’t know. We certainly weren’t the first to do anything—not to ball, not to win, not to lose, not to suffer, but that didn’t matter. To us, basketball was a historical record of all the ways a body can move with and for another. What could be better than the strange and perverse pleasure of being known?”

At the center of this novel is Mack, a senior point guard being recruited at top colleges around the country. When her father dies, she meets Liv at the funeral. Liv is an equally good player at a rival school, and the two begin a complicated, intimate, and destructive friendship and basketball partnership laced with forbidden attraction. Over the course of their season, Mack and Liv wrestle with their college choices, their complicated relationships with their families, and the growing intimacy and desire between them.

This novel is beautifully written, with lots of gorgeous quotes that convey how intensely the characters feel about their sport and each other. I would highly recommend A Sharp Endless Need to fans of literary, character-driven novels, lovers of women’s sports, and queer folks.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for a free eARC in exchange for an honest review!

You can’t tell by the cover, but this is actually a YA coming of age sports romance. Basketball, specifically.

The writing is lyrical and the characters are flawed, there are family issues and these kids are trying to figure themselves out and they’re playing basketball and doing drugs and drinking and struggling with the big decisions and big feelings that come with growing up.

Overall, it’s a really lovely novel to listen to and a pretty quick read.

Thank you @netgalley and @thedialpress for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

In A Sharp Endless Need, Crane paints a vivid coming-of-age story set within the intense world of early 2000s high school basketball. The narrative centers on Mack, a talented player with her sights set on D1 college sports, whose life takes a turbulent turn with the sudden loss of her father and the arrival of her enigmatic new teammate, Liv.

Told through Mack's vulnerable first-person perspective, the novel masterfully portrays the turbulent inner world of a teenager wrestling with grief, the awakening of her sexuality, and the fundamental question of who she truly is. Mack's profound sense of displacement outside the basketball court underscores the sport's significance in her life.

Crane's prose is consistently lyrical and evocative, successfully conveying the emotional weight of Mack's experiences. I was particularly struck by her ability to capture the unique, almost untamed spirit of the early 2000s – that elusive feeling that's hard to define but instantly recognizable. Moreover, she beautifully articulates the universal teenage struggle of self-discovery and the often-confusing landscape of burgeoning desires.

My appreciation for the author's nuanced portrayal of adolescence, however, is tempered by my strong reaction to the book's conclusion. Furthermore, the seemingly ubiquitous drug and alcohol use among the characters felt exaggerated and, based on my own teenage experience during that era, potentially unrealistic.

Ultimately, while the ending and the depiction of substance use gave me pause, A Sharp Endless Need offers a compelling exploration of grief, identity, and the messy process of growing up, anchored by Crane's beautiful writing.

Thank you to The Dial Press for providing an advance copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a moody/angsty coming of age read. As a non-basketball player the love of the game was explored in a way that felt accessible for me. The pacing was slower than I like even though this was a short book it felt longer.

Thank you Netgalley & Random House Publishing Group - Random House | The Dial Press for the advanced reader copy.

“To us, basketball was a historical record of all the ways a body can move with and for another. What could be better than the strange and perverse pleasure of being known?”

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for the eARC! This book was released in the US on May 13, 2025.

I finished A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane with tears on my face and gravel in my chest. It’s a book that hurts and holds, like an ice bath for tender queer hearts: shocking, raw, strangely soothing. Crane gives us Mack—a fiercely competitive high school basketball player, a closeted queer teen, a grieving daughter navigating the electric tension of first love and the deep grief of all the things she can’t say aloud.

Set against the backdrop of early 2000s suburbia—complete with Sixers jerseys, Wet Seal, and Allen Iverson posters—Crane’s novel pulses with desire, despair, and the desperate hunger to be seen. Mack’s love for her best friend and teammate, Liv, is all sweat and eye contact, late-night phone calls, and bruised bodies sharing court space and grief. Their bond is both intoxicating and tenuous, as much about what’s withheld as what’s spoken. On the basketball court, they’re poetry in motion; off it, they’re a car crash in slow motion.

Crane’s prose is lush, physical, and deeply interior—Mack’s voice aches with need, shame, and sharp self-awareness. This is not a tidy coming-out story. It’s a gutting portrayal of how queerness can be both a revelation and a risk, especially in environments saturated with repression, silence, and toxic masculinity. There are moments where Mack thinks queerness can’t ruin her life if she just never names it. God, am I familiar with that thought.

This book is for the girls with calloused hands and guarded hearts. The ones who fell in love with their best friends in locker rooms and car rides, who measured their desire in eye contact and shared playlists. For the sapphics who didn’t get an easy first time, or who loved someone who couldn’t love them back out loud.

And it’s for the ones who lost parents too young and had to rebuild a future with grief in their backpack. Mack’s relationship with her dad, flawed and tender, layered with masculine pride and unspeakable queerness, is one of the most nuanced depictions of loss I’ve read in a while.

A Sharp Endless Need isn’t easy. It tackles trauma, queer shame, corrective violence, and the devastation of untethered longing. But it’s also a radiant testament to survival, to reinvention, to queer kids who find meaning even after the game ends.

This novel felt like getting dunked in heartbreak and hauled back up by hope. If you like your queer stories devastating, tender, and absolutely unafraid to go there, this one will live in your chest for a long, long time. Thank you, Mac Crane, for all the gay yearning - it broke my heart once again.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, aching queer coming-of-age stories; intimate depictions of first love and grief; or books by Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Longing and Shame, First Love and Friendship, Survival and Reinvention, Silence and Unspoken Desires.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Death of a Parent (severe), Alcohol (severe), Abandonment (minor), Drug Use (severe), Alcoholism (moderate), Homophobia (severe), Sexual Content (moderate), Sexual Assault (moderate), Suicide (minor), Grief (minor), Injury / Injury Detail (moderate), Medical Content (minor).

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the eARC.

This book..... this book. I know nothing about basketball, but I do know something about a good book. And this one is just that. The love is tragic and all consuming, it is smothering as the girls are also smothered in their small town(s). Brilliant.

Althoguh the representation of queer identity and coming of age was handled very well and the basketball was very real, however the writing style felt very disjointed and I had a hard time really knowing these characters and figuring out what was going on.

This will do well, but I recognize that this just wasn't for me.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an early copy.

I unfortunately was just not vibing with this one at all. I really liked the author’s writing and think she used such beautiful language to convey such a difficult and confusing time. But there was just so much detail on basketball and basketball games, and that really took me out of it as I just didn’t care. I think this book is going to find its audience, but unfortunately that isn’t me.I really tried hard to get past the basketball, but after 20%, I just wasn’t enjoying reading this and felt it was time to call it quits.

While sports novels aren’t my typical interest, the prose in A Sharp Endless Need was so beautiful it was hard to put down at times. Touching on many tender topics in such a beautiful way, Marisa Crane is a gorgeous writer and treats her characters with such care.
As a non-sports fan, the basketball scenes sometimes tended to drag on a bit but that was a me problem and not an author problem.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

📚: A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane
⭐️: 3/5

A coming of age story that I devoured in a single evening, but somehow left me feeling a bit hallow.

Maybe it was the basketball plot and theme (it did make me wish I liked basketball more than I do), maybe I didn’t quite connect with the characters. It feels like I’m in the minority with a lower than 4 star rating, so maybe this is a case of, “it’s not the book, it’s just not the book for me.”

Thanks to Random House via @netgalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. A Sharp Endless Need is out now.

A queer coming-of-age novel set around women's basketball? I already knew Mac Crane was going to hit me right in the chest with this one. They write the kind of prose you can really sink your teeth into. Simply excellent.

A short but intense novel about queer teenage basketball players. Sports novels are admittedly not my typical read, but the premise was too compelling for me to pass up and I’m so glad I picked this one up!

This is a portrait of a talented high school basketball player in a moment of crisis. Mack’s father, who was her biggest cheerleader, dies unexpectedly early on in the novel, and then Mack’s life sort of spirals out of control after that. Her father is gone and left their family with his gambling debt. Her mother is locked in her own experience of grief. The pressure of the imminent deadline to commit to a college is overwhelming. She’s struggling with her attraction to one of her teammates (important to note that the setting is a small town in the early 2000s). It quickly becomes clear that Mack is using drugs and alcohol not just recreationally like her teammates but recklessly and as an escape. We are watching Mack hurdling self-destructively toward her uncertain future and it’s honestly a little frightening as a reader who has become endeared toward this troubled young woman over the first half of the book.

The prose in this book is just gorgeous and riveting, especially the descriptions of basketball. You don’t have to care about or understand the game to get a feel for the intensity of the game and the magic of playing it with a teammate you are deeply connected to. The fraught interactions between the characters off the court are also very well written, with so much left unsaid and conveyed only by body language. This is an instance of the author doing a really impressive job of both showing and telling with their character development. Overall, this was an extremely powerful and lyrical novel that will appeal to a lot of readers despite its very specific premise.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press | Random House Publishing for the opportunity to be an early reader of this title, which is available now!

A Sharp Endless Need is a compelling coming of age novel that covers so many emotional topics while telling the story of Mack and Liv. Grief over losing a parent, parental disapproval, parental discord, teenage drinking and drug use, bonding and also jealousy inherent in high school sports, choosing a college, interfacing with college scouts and recruiters, sexual stress/expectations between high school students, dealing with rumors, dealing with teammates and coaches, first love, and the true love of basketball are all featured throughout this emotional story. Marisa Crane brought back the joy of watching my daughters play basketball in high school. It also reminded me of what a stressful time of life high school can be for so many many reasons.
Not wanting to give much of the plot away Marisa Crane reminds us all about our first love and all the feelings evoked. Many thanks to Marisa Crane, The Dial Press, and NetGalley for affording me the opportunity to read an arc of this just published book. Three and a half stars.

I don’t think I will ever get over this. The nostalgia, the yearning, the beautiful and heart wrenching writing. This book is a gift to queer folks everywhere.