THE BOOKS DESK · REVIEW
Keeping Score
4.5 stars · Friends-to-lovers yearning, baseball, a competitive heroine and a man who has been suffering in silence for ten years.
Rikki Voss has been in love with his best friend for ten years, and apparently I have a weakness for men who suffer in silence.
Because this man is DOWN BAD.
Keeping Score is a friends-to-lovers sports romance about Rikki and Mila, two people who have spent years building the kind of friendship where the other person is simply woven into their life. And that’s what made this work for me. Their relationship doesn’t start when the romance starts. It has history. Inside jokes. Loyalty. Jealousy nobody wants to admit is jealousy. Years of showing up for one another while somehow missing—or avoiding—the giant flashing sign saying YOU TWO ARE IN LOVE.
Rikki, especially, got me.
He has loved Mila for years, and what I appreciated most was that his love isn’t just possessiveness disguised as devotion. He genuinely wants her to be happy, even when he thinks that happiness might not include him. There is something particularly painful about a man silently comparing every relationship to the woman he believes he can’t have.
Sir. Please stand up.
Actually, don’t. I like you exactly like this.
The flashbacks really helped sell their relationship for me. Instead of simply being told these two have been best friends forever, we get to see pieces of the friendship that created the adults they are now. It makes every little shift in the present feel bigger because you understand just how much they have to lose if they get this wrong.
And Mila isn’t just there to be Rikki’s dream girl.
She’s competitive, ambitious, stubborn and serious about baseball. I loved that her career mattered. She’s a catcher. She’s an athlete. She has goals that exist completely outside of this relationship, and the book doesn’t suddenly ask her to shrink them because she finally found love.
THANK YOU.
The baseball setting was also genuinely fun. The Mango Ball world has enough personality—teams, mascots, fan events, rivalries, spring training and all the ridiculousness surrounding it—that baseball actually feels like part of the story instead of a decorative jersey somebody threw onto a romance novel.
And yes.
The chemistry CHEMISTRIES.
Once Rikki and Mila finally stop pretending that what is happening between them is completely platonic, things get very spicy very quickly. But what saved it from becoming spice for spice’s sake is that the emotional intimacy was already there. These two know each other. They trust each other. They’ve already been emotionally intertwined for years.
The physical relationship is just the final idiot finally turning on the lights.
My biggest issue was the Eli situation. Mila begins the story in another relationship while her feelings for Rikki are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and there were moments where that emotional gray area made me uncomfortable. I wanted that relationship resolved sooner instead of watching everyone hover around a boundary that was getting blurrier by the chapter.
I did, however, really appreciate Mila refusing to let herself become something one man could simply hand over to another. Her choices are hers. Her career is hers. Her future is hers.
That distinction mattered.
I also think some of the flashbacks could have been trimmed once the present-day romance really started moving. I understood why they were there, and several of them added enormously to the emotional payoff, but occasionally I wanted to yell, NO, TAKE ME BACK TO WHAT WAS JUST HAPPENING.
But where Keeping Score really won me over was in understanding that getting together isn’t the finish line.
Careers happen. Distance happens. Life doesn’t magically reorganize itself because two people finally admit they’re in love. Mila and Rikki have to figure out how this relationship fits into two lives that were already moving forward.
And underneath everything is this ridiculously romantic realization:
They weren’t searching for some extraordinary new person.
They had already found their person years ago.
They just hadn’t figured out what to call it yet.
4.5 stars. Funny, spicy, emotional and full of the kind of friends-to-lovers yearning that makes you want to grab two fictional people by the shoulders and scream, PLEASE LOOK DIRECTLY AT EACH OTHER.
Rikki Voss, your decade of suffering has been noted.
And appreciated.
ARC provided for review. All opinions are my own.
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