Cleat Cute - Meryl Wilsner

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Grace Henderson has been a star of the US Women's National Team for ten years, even though she's only 26. But when she's sidelined with an injury, a bold new upstart, Phoebe Matthews, takes her spot. 22-year-old Phoebe is everything Grace isn't - a gregarious jokester who plays with a joy that Grace lost somewhere along the way. The last thing Grace expects is to become teammates with benefits with this class clown she sees as her rival.

Phoebe Matthews is too focused on her first season as a professional soccer player to think about seducing her longtime idol. But when Grace ends up making the first move, they can't keep their hands off of each other.

As the World Cup approaches and Grace works her way back from injury, a miscommunication leaves the women with hilariously different perspectives on their relationship. But they're on the same page on the field, realizing they can play together instead of vying for the same position. With every tackle the tension between them grows, and both players soon have to decide what's more important - being together or making the roster."

📚📚📚 

Well, this book sure did try to do a lot, and it did some of it okay. I thought the initial introductions of the main characters established who they were as people pretty well, and I liked how intentionally inclusive the writing was without feeling forced. I'm also very on board with a book about badass women athletes, so it had me there. Where it started to veer off course for me was the immediacy of Phoebe and Grace's romance. It felt forced and not fully developed when it kicked off, and then on top of that, a lot of the drama for their relationship stemmed from pretty flimsy miscommunications. Very meh.

I also think it seemed like the author wanted to take on a lot of things, like female athletes being grossly underpaid, shitty insurance bullshit that classifies gender-affirming surgery for trans people as elective, and how many girls with ADHD don't get diagnosed and are left to just fend for themselves and figure out how to manage their shit without support. Very cool, all of these things (and everything else in the book that I'm forgetting about now) need to be talked about. But it was sooooo many things to try to squeeze in between steamy secret sex between teammates (sidenote: not a huge fan of "baby girl" as a sexy nickname), so it ended up being a lot of "this thing is mentioned" and then...nothing is done with it. 

The ADHD thing in particular kind of caught me by surprise because it seemed the entire book like Phoebe was very aware that she had ADHD, and then we get almost to the end of the book and it turns out she had no idea. Sorry, but she was basically a walking "Signs of ADHD" poster, and there were MANY mentions to all the time she spends on TikTok...but somehow she never ended up on ADHD TikTok? That's TikTok algorithm slander, honestly. At the end of the day, it didn't ruin the book for me, but I found it very odd.

My issues with the book aside, it's alright. Not amazing, not terrible. Short-ish. Pretty quick read. It's fine.