This book is another banger from Lynn Painter. I loved both FMC and the MMC. Both characters were frustrating in the beginning (purposefully so) and grew into very lovable characters. The fake dating plot is chefs kiss. I will recommend this book to anyone!!!!

fake skating • arc review 💌🏒🥅📖
Sometimes all you need in life is a good YA arc to pull you out of a reading slump. This book had all of the ingredients to become an instant favorite for me - hockey, fake dating, longing, banter, library lunch dates!!!!!! I finished this in under 24 hours and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Alec and Dani go through so many labels throughout this book (childhood friends to enemies to fake boyfriend/girlfriend to REAL boyfriend/girlfriend) that it feels like a true teenage romance unfolding right before your eyes. Somehow this book didn’t seem super insta-lovey or insta-forgivey which I really appreciated. It gave time for the main characters to reconcile old differences, learn who the other is as a teen rather than a child, and eventually fall in love (eeeeeeek). I was giggling, kicking my lil feet, and constantly highlighting sections of this book while reading. Also maybe this is just me, but I pictured Jack Hughes the ENTIRE BOOK so he gets a few honorary spots on slide 2 😌. I can’t wait for september so I can have a physical version of this on my shelves!!!!

What to expect:
📖 book loving, strong-willed, military kid fmc
🏒 music loving, ambitious, hockey player mmc
📖 childhood friend —> high school romance
🏒 fake dating trope (swooooooooooon)
📖 strong supporting characters
🏒 small-hockey-town-in-the-winter-vibes
📖 a grumpy, but lovable, grandpa

rating: ★★★★
pub date: september 30, 2025

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing for providing me an advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review! 🫶🏼

Painter writes my favorite YA romances and this is one of her best! Dani and her mom return to Minnesota to live with her grandpa after her parents' divorce. She lived there when she was in middle school and Alec was her best friend. When her family moved away, she and Alec promised to send postcards to each other using a special code. But something happened and the cards quit coming. They were both hurt because they thought the other person ghosted them. Now she’s back and it’s her senior year of high school and she’s anxious about seeing him again.

When she's accidentally knocked over in the hallway by a guy’s big athletic bag, she’s surprised to see it's Alec's bag! Everyone calls him Zeus and he’s the star of their high school hockey team! They are wary of each other at first (because of the ghosting) but then Dani needs another activity for her college application and the only thing available is co-manager of the hockey team. As they get to know each other again, their banter is the best, so snarky and fun. Then, something happens and they end up fake dating!

Dani is an excellent student and dreams of going to Harvard. Her dad is pressuring her to come back to live with him in Germany, but she’s happy living with her mom and grandpa and likes her new friends - plus there’s Alec. Alec has scouts coming to watch his games and he feels the pressure to perform well. (He really needs a scholarship for college.) There are more things going on in the story that kept me quickly turning the pages. (Dani's Grandpa is the GOAT!) It doesn’t take long before Dani and Alec are close again. This and The Do Over are now tied as my favorite Lynn Painter YA romances - I really loved it! My full review will be at All About Romance closer to the release date.

4/5 Stars

This book perfectly captures why I'm drawn to YA romance. It delivers exactly what the heart craves: young love in all its innocent, butterflies-inducing glory.

The story follows Dani and Alec, childhood best friends who were inseparable during summer visits despite living apart the rest of the year. Their bond was so strong that they promised to stay connected through postcards, but as often happens. But they lose touch.

Years later, fate brings them back together when Dani moves to Alec's town during her senior year, and life throws them together again...Only now they have to pretend to be a couple!! YIKESSS… or maybe YAYYY? (Honestly, both..hehe.)

What impressed me the most was the author's ability to strike that delicate balance that makes or breaks YA fiction. Too often, these books either sound too mature, losing that genuine teenage voice or they swing too far the other way into the cringe-worthy territory with characters who seem younger than their supposed age. This book nails the sweet spot. The characters feel like actual 17-year-olds. They are flawed, funny, figuring it out stuff but never annoying or over-the-top.

Dani and Alec's reconnection was sweet and believable like slipping into old habits.. It reminded me of revisiting your childhood home and automatically reaching for light switches in all the right places, or like riding a bike where your muscles just remember the balance without conscious thought. Watching them ease back into their friendship before sliding into something deeper filled me with all those warm, fuzzy feelings that I was hoping for.
This is ideal weekend reading when you want something light and heartwarming. Sometimes we all need a book that simply makes us smile, and this one delivers exactly that.

fake skating by @lynnpainterbooks (ARC)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
thank you @netgalley and @simonteen for this E-ARC! i ADORED this book so much and it was so perfect. the characters were adorable and i really saw myself in dani a lot. i bet a lot of us book girlies will 🤭. there is so much strong chemistry throughout the book with the characters! the writing is perfect and is obviously the cutest thing ever. lynn painter does it again! i can’t wait for the rest of the world to read this and to get my hands on a physical copy on september 30th! 🩵

First off, thank you so much netgally for this gem of a book!!

LYNN FREAKING PAINTER has done it again & personally, the best yet!! as someone else said “move over Nick & Emilie because hello Alec & Dani” 🤭❤️‍🔥

I have never read a hockey book yet so this was my first one & honestly just a great place to start. It gave me some hockey without making the book all about that along with the pureness, tension, banter, drama & love. I physically laughed out loud to this one, the Alec was just a cornball & Dani matched it since they’ve been childhood friends who spent summers together & wrote postcards to each other during the rest of the year till one day the postcards just stopped.
I also teared up a little because Dani had spent her life moving place to place because her dad’s air force so she never felt like she had a place to call home or real friends since she didn’t stick around long. Just the overall way her dad acted & spoke reminded me of my Army dad & how he was currently stationed in Germany (where I was born), felt like Lynn just wrote about my life.

I need Lynn to pull a sequel from her mind like as of yesterday because I need more asap but I can’t wait for this to be out because I will be getting it & recommending it to everyone!

Lynn Painter is truly a literary romcom genius. Idk how she does it over and over and over again. But I couldn’t love her books more than I do. Fake Skating was incredibly cute and humorous but also had a really great emotional and heartfelt side to it as well. I loved the relationship between Dani and her grandpa. And how that all played into the hockey plot with him being a former NHL star. The relationship between Dani and Alec was just so sweet and I had so much fun getting to know them and see them reconnect as friends and then while in a “fake” relationship. I love Love LOVED this book from start to finish!

This book has a lot of strong language in it. It is a fun green romance though. I loved the storyline and characters. Great writing minus the language.

Lynn Lainter never misses! Her books have this silly, goofy, lighthearted, teenage vibe going on and it always makes you feel like a ypung highschooler again and brings nostalgia. Cute and wholesome as always, perfect for teens especially!

This was my first Lynn Painter novel, but it definitely won't be my last! I loved the slow burn yearning between the two characters; it really made it feel like an upper YA/NA book even though it's pretty clean. Absolutely adorable - 10 stars, really!

LOVE Lynn Painter and was absolutely honored to have been given an ARC. She writes teenage romance so well and this was another good one. Dani and Alec were childhood best friends whose friendship fell apart when they broke off contact with one another after Dani moved away. When Dani moves back to town, they are forced to reconnect but realize that they both have changed since they last saw each other, and their unresolved feelings for each other and the past start to bubble to the surface.

I loved both characters so much and they were easy to root for. Dani suffers from the impermanence of moving every couple years (because of her father's job) and doesn't feel that anywhere is really home for her. She also tries to balance her relationships with each of her parents as their marriage falls apart (and it was heartbreaking to see how she felt pulled in different directions and even manipulated emotionally). Alec is struggling under the pressure of being a hockey star from his family and the town's expectations. Both of them lean on each other as a source of comfort from their problems (literally when they start fake dating), but the unresolved conflict of their past looms in the background of their relationship. Fake Skating packs an emotional punch and we get POVs from both Dani and Alec. I felt the bitterness each of them held from their past rise up as the book goes on but I was still rooting for Alec and Dani to get through it and come out stronger. I do wish the ending was a bit more flushed out (felt rather rushed and abrupt) and felt like some plots weren't finished.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Publishing for an eARC!

4.25 ⭐ overall

I really love Lynn Painter’s writing and this is another of her books I would definitely recommend.

It’s so easy to fall into the story and already be rooting for the couple in the first chapter. I loved the playful back and forth between Dani and Alec.

There was so much angst in this one I wanted to lock them in a room to talk it out. It was easy to see where both Dani and Alec were coming from. Alec’s hurt was wrapped up in feeling like his best friend wasn’t there when he needed her most and she felt abandoned in a time when she felt alone. For the most part I understood Alec’s reaction to her, though I wished he would give her a little benefit of the doubt after a while.

I had a complicated feeling toward Dani’s mom through most of the book. I think in big part because when Dani would have thoughts about her mom it tended to be mixed in with her own feeling of being an outsider and her mom trying to push her to socialize (Dani’s thought that her mom made her feel like “a broken weirdo” just destroyed me).

I feel for her mom because she’s back home with old friends, out of an emotionally controlling relationship, and finally allowed to enjoy herself but at times it came across to me like her daughter was an inconvenience or kind of just there. I think it would have benefitted from at least one substantial mother/daughter scene earlier, to show that she accepted her daughter as is and was still there for her, not just constantly smiling at her when she was with Alec.

I do wish the end had a little more. With Dani so focused on getting into Harvard it would’ve been nice if she had a passion that she was focused on studying. It felt like a few holes were left in the plot, like a more concrete conversation between Alec and his parents, more of an explanation of Dani/Benji, and the reveals Dani got about her mom from her grandpa felt unresolved.

Thank you Netgalley & Simon & Schuster Publishing for the ARC of this book! As a big fan of Lynn Painter (Better Than The Movies is one of my favorite books) I was so excited to read this! It was definitely such a fun, easy read that I got through pretty quickly. I really enjoyed the sweet hometown feel of this book, as well as the relationships between the main characters and their families. I would have loved to have more of that! The relationship between Dani & Alec had me kicking my feet and rooting for them, and I love how everything came together in the end. That being said, I did struggle with all of the cussing in this book, it definitely felt like a lot and made me not take the story as seriously. The ending also felt very abrupt, like the big events as well as their conclusions were just all squeezed into the last little bit of the book. But I did overall enjoy the story & look forward to more from Lynn Painter!

Another absoloutley amazing read by Lynn painter ! This book had me giggling and laughing the entire time and i wish it was a duology.

Dani and Alex are childhood best friends, inseperable until Dani's dad gets stationed somewhere far away from Alex's town. Nevertheless, they exchange postcards weekly, until one day, the postcards just stop coming. Fast forward a couple years, Dani is 18 with dreams of going to Harvard. She moves back to Alex's hometown with her Mum and dreads facing Alex after his postcards stop coming. But alex is no longer the nerdy, cute boy she once knew. Now, he's a star hockey player, popular, handsome and adored at school. This is probably my second favourite Lynn painter book ever, seriously, the pop culture references just pull the whole thing together, as they do with all of her other books. Can't wait for everyone else to read it, and i'm so so happy i got an arc of this, so thank you netgalley !

Lynn Painter is truly one of the best romance authors in particular when it comes to her YA romance. Fake Skating had me blushing and gave me butterflies. It was so cutesy and as an incoming college freshman having the book be set in the end of senior year was perfect as I just graduated high school. Overall this novel was perfect and Dani and Alec were so well written and I cannot wait for what Lynn Painter cooks up next.

I’ve read so many of Lynn Painter’s books and I’ve loved every one of them. This was a very cute read and I highly enjoyed it. Dani and Alec are such great characters and from the very beginning I enjoyed their dynamic. I loved that despite the miscommunication in their past they still got along very well even if they had some resentment towards each other for a misunderstanding. It was so nice to see that Alec was welcoming with Dani after a while even if he initially didn’t want to see her. He was friendly and integrated her with his friends. Dani used to be confident, more outgoing but over the years grew to be introverted and anxious while Alec grew more confident. This was such a cute book and I loved Alec and Dani’s friendship. I think many people will also enjoy this book! Thank you Netgalley for the arc, I enjoyed this book!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

I'm a simple woman: I see a new YA rom-com from Lynn Painter, I make a request for an ARC as soon as humanly possible. So, it broke my heart a little bit when I finished this and my reaction was...meh.

As a Minnesotan, I LOVED seeing all the references to suburbs around the Twin Cities and guessing where various bars and restaurants were located, and I lost my mind when Alec and Dani went on a date to the freaking Rainforest Cafe in the MOA. I liked the banter between Dani and Alec, and Lynn Painter writes a pining teenage boy so well! Wes and Liz are still my favorite couple in Painter's YA world, but Dani and Alec are a close second. As great as she is at writing teens, Painter also does a great job of fleshing out the parents and adults in her novels, and I like how they always play an active role in the plot.

All of that said... the conflicts surrounding the fake dating scheme were pretty thin. It seemed like there were too many problems to solve and none of them felt resolved in a satisfying way (especially the reveal with Dani's father). I also did not learn nearly enough about Dani and her Harvard dream. Like yes, Dani wants to go to Harvard and it's her dream and she spent a lot of time in Boston at a kid, but that didn't feel like enough. If we got a single line from Alec saying that he wanted to study history in college, I feel like we could've gotten a touch more about Dani's academic ambitions for when she gets to Harvard.

Overall, this is a solid entry into Lynn Painter's YA romcom universe. It wasn't my favorite, but it was still very cute and I will definitely recommend it to teen readers when it comes out!

I loved every second of this book! Lynn painter never fails to write an amazing story full of romance and longing.

I love any books with childhood friends to enemies to lovers and fake dating. Dani and Alec are both like able characters, and I especially appreciated Dani’s relatability when it comes to social anxiety.

I flew through this one and would highly recommend it to all!

Another amazing rom Com from lynn painter. She hasn't written a story I didn't think. The premise of this story was adorable and warm hearted. I'm hoping one of her books gets picked up for a movie soon. Can't wait to see what she does next!

Do you hear that?

THAT would be the sound of bells and whistles sounding off in celebration of this novel.
Yes, it's that good.

From the start, the author lays out the estrangement between Dani and Alec, former childhood bff. The excellent pacing of the books motivates the reader to delve deep as the reason "why" slowly unfolds.

Told from a dual POV with equal amounts of attention given to both characters, the reader is given a front seat to how their initial reconnection fraught with distrust transforms due to a moment taken out of context. You'll hear Alec's misgivings about his path that seemingly appears out of his control. You'll see Dani steadily regain her confidence.

Alongside the romance are the connections made with immediate and extended family. This just enhanced an already good read.


This ARC was provided by the publisher, Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing | Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.