“The book that ruined my life.” PHOTO CREDIT: Maddie Bataille | Photo Editor
Last year, this very week, Rhode Island and the rest of the North East was hit with a massive blizzard. Maybe you remember it, maybe you don’t, but I certainly do.
The weekend of the blizzard I went home to spend time with my dog and help my parents shovel. Since it was the first weekend of school, I didn’t have a lot of homework, so I decided to take home a book I had been meaning to read for a while.
The book is called “From Lukov with Love” by Mariana Zapata. I found out about it on TikTok. I had been wanting to read it for a while, but decided that this weekend would be the perfect time, since I knew the book had to do with figure skaters; and not only was this a snowy week inside, but it was also the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games.
The weekend was perfect indeed. Almost too perfect.
I read the entire 538 page book between Saturday and Sunday. The majority of it on Sunday between the hours of 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. I finished the book before waking up for my 9 a.m. class five hours later. Then, I continued to talk my friends’ ears off about this book for the following year.
My friends all know this book because it was the primary topic of my life in the year 2022. They know it as “the ice skating book” or “the book that ruined my life.” I made my friend Hannah, who was a real figure skater, take me figure skating twice because I was convinced after reading the book I would be able to take on the skills I read about. Safe to say, I was wrong.
The book tells the story of Jasmine Santos, a 29-year-old woman who grew up figure skating at the Lukov Ice and Sports Complex. She competed in pairs but was never able to go to the Olympics because her partner bailed on her. However, when the Olympic star Ivan Lukov, for whom her complex is named for (due to his success) is unable to compete with his partner, he unexpectedly asks Jasmine to step in and train with him. The catch — they’re enemies.
Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when they first start training together, but in the way of fiction, they eventually learn to value each other as partners and people, as they spend every day together training for an entire year.
First things first, let’s get one point out of the way — is this a romance book? Technically, yes. Do I like romance books? Most definitely. But did I like this book because it’s a romance book? No. Absolutely not.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Jasmine and Ivan’s romance. I think about it all the time. Did I find this book because of its acclaim as a romance? Yes.
However, the thing that really did it for me with this book was the skating. I’ve read plenty of sports-related fiction books in my time, and somehow the sports are always overshadowed. The characters never talk about going to practice and then somehow miraculously win the big game! It makes me so, so angry.
Mariana Zapata, however, did not disappoint. She wrote about all the practices so realistically and in depth over the course of an entire year including injuries, interviews, promos, personal struggles, and my favorite, off-ice rehearsals — something that is so realistic for ice skaters.
This book was so good it put me into an intense reading slump, causing me to be unable to read anything else for months because of my inability to think of anything but this book everytime I picked it up.
As if it being the Olympics, a blizzard and me binging this book in 48 hours wasn’t enough for me to be obsessed with it, I found out that this book was (most likely) loosely based off of the real ice dance pair, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who are the most decorated ice dancers of all time. The final performance that Jasmine and Lukov skate in the book is almost exactly the same as Virtue and Moir’s 2018 Olympic gold routine to a mashup of songs from “Moulin Rouge.”
I’ve never been able to have the experience of seeing my favorite book characters in real life but let me tell you — it was life changing.
I cannot recommend this book enough. It might be so good that you can’t read another book after it, but the experience is unmatched.