This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviewed at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.
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First to Finish was a brain-breaker of a novel for me. Most of the time, it came off as an amusing, though not outstanding, coworkers-to-lovers romance in which our heroes find true love through hard work, change, perseverance and a whole lot of coffee. But the book suffers hard from some factual errors and fails to properly ground its characters in their backgrounds, and these flaws dragged it down for me. I was on the bubble about recommending it for a good third of my read, but in the end the book failed to captivate me and landed a mid-level grade.
Johannes Muller is a racecar driver whose relationship is on the brink of failure – as it should be, because his boyfriend Jackson Calder forgot his birthday. They’re in an undercover relationship that Johannes has kept secret from everyone in his life, and he’s miserable. His career, too, is suffering from a sudden downturn of fortune. At twenty-nine he’s at a total crossroads and has no idea what he’s going to do with his life. Jackson chooses to dump Johannes right before the wedding of his dear friend and former situationship Harper (Co-hero of the previous book, Pole Position). Johannes does not take things well, to say the least: he’s mentally rocked after the break-up and can’t get it together.
Caleb Hughes is Johannes’ race engineer, and he’s been skeptical of Johannes’ weak performances on the track all year, and confused as to what’s gone wrong since he was constantly on the podium during the previous season. Caleb offers his friendship to Joahnnes, and they try to figure out how to get Johannes back on track. But along the way their feelings begin to turn toward romance, leaving them with complicated emotions to deal with and a season to be won.
First to Finish is less exciting than Pole Position, the first book in the series, which really made you feel the stakes of the connection between Harper and James and their enemies-to-lovers connection. This time I was distracted by the mistakes in the prose, and it’s hard not to notice them if you know anything at all about F1. In a world where an error’s a quick Google search away it was impossible for me to overlook missteps like incorrect track lengths and unlikely race times because I already had experience with the sport.
It’s even worse when Southerner Caleb suddenly starts speaking in Britishisms like “shag” (as in sex, not as in dancing) when he’s talking with his friends. His family serves Johannes a Banofee pie and this is treated like typical Southern cuisine and nope, not quite – maybe a banana cream pie would’ve worked? Whatever the opposite of Britpicking is, it should have happened here editorially.
Caleb and Johannes are an amusing pair, to say the least. They both consider coffee to be something akin to a religion, which kept making me giggle as I read the book. And they both consider winning the alpha and omega of their lives.
I wanted to give this a higher grade for having a lovely couple who effortlessly charmed me as I read. If I gritted my teeth and ignored all of these logic gaps, I actually like the twosome here and their community of oddball racers trying to stomp their careers into shape. The twists and turns they took toward committing to each other kept me reading.
But the factual errors, and worse, the very superficial depiction of the leads, a Southern man and a Black F1 driver, really soured my experience the more I thought about it. Johannes being Black had little impact on the story, which is baffling considering F1 is a very White sport. And while this is from the endnotes, the author’s book-beginning playlist for Caleb contains Morgan Wallen songs. And considering what we know about Mr. Wallen, that is, uh – a choice.
I was pulled in by Caleb and Johannes’ chemistry, their energy, their sense of joie de vivre, but First to Finish doesn’t make a podium here. It couldn’t outrun factual errors, continuity mistakes, and, most of all, almost offensively shallow characterization.
