ARC Review: Pole Position by Rebecca J. Caffrey

 

Red, White and Royal Blue meets Formula 1!

Kian Walker has always been the golden boy of motor sport. The four-time Championship winner has racing in his DNA – his father was a legend on the track, just don’t let him catch you comparing the two. As reckless and unreliable at home as he was behind the wheel, there’s nothing Kian wants less than to be just like his dad.

Enter Harper James. This year’s rookie called up to compete with the big boys – and Kian’s new teammate. Cocky, hot-headed and with a reputation for breaking as many hearts as he does new track records, Harper’s the opposite of Kian in every way. But when the season starts, there’s no getting away from him.

This might be one of the most dangerous sports in the world, so why then does Kian’s heart feel safer flying around the track at 220mph than when he's anywhere near his teammate?

Title: Pole Position

Author: Rebecca J. Caffery

Publisher: Harper 360/Harper Adult Audio/One More Chapter

Review:

Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Adult Audio/One More Chapter, and Harper 30 for providing  me with an egalley an audio arc of this book to read and give my honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

I've been looking for a good F1 book. I'm a huge fan and follow pretty closely so I know a lot about the sport, the teams, some of the technology and engineering, even. This is not my first F1 book and so far they have all let me down in one way or another. I picked this one as it made sense to me to read a book in a male dominant field with the main characters as two males. Sadly, this book did not live up to my expectations, either.

Let's start with the audio part of the book. I'm unsurprised the narrators use British voices but I will say Joshua Chase and James Joseph were similar enough that it was sometimes hard to tell them apart. This was annoying if I missed the title of the chapter saying who it was. I could usually pick it out once it got going as the narrators did make the voices of the characters unique enough with tone and inflection, plus the author definitely showed each personality of the characters. The narrator that did Harper's voice had a very low quality of his voice. Almost a whisper at times and I found myself having to rewind to hear what he said.

If the narrators not being to my liking wasn't enough, the entire story and plot line just fell short. I feel like the author needed to do a lot more research into F1. You can see some if it there, while at other times it's severely lacking. It's not believable that two F1 drivers would share a trailer for weeks on end while touring. It's not believable that a reserve driver is brought up and has zero understanding about how to talk to the media; he's getting his first trainings now? Seems highly unlikely. Finally, F1 is an expensive sport. You don't really see poor, orphaned kids who have zero support racing. Where is the money coming from? it just makes zero sense.

As I said above, the author did a good job making the two characters distinct. Kian as the stuck up, regimented driver who doesn't want to deviate from his schedule or be friends and Harper who is carefree and not caring who thinks what of him. He does as he pleases and has no inkling of how his actions hurt or injure others. This was truly the only part of the story that might be believable.

Did I feel the chemistry between these two? Not at all. Was their relationship (love/hate, I guess?) believable? Not really because the attraction they talk about (what the author tells us, rather than shows us) just didn't feel like it was really there. And, since this was the entire premise of the book, the growth of the characters felt stunted and overall underdeveloped. I felt zero connection or empathy for either of these characters. Even when the author gave us a bone and look into the background of the characters, which I would hope would help me connect, I just didn't care enough to feel badly for them in any way.

And the pacing was so slow! I just kept waiting for something to happen by even by 60%, when the characters have finally gotten together in some capacity, it was still just stunted. It dragged and I had to push and push and push to even care to finish it. Once I got annoyed enough with the narrators, I switched to Kindle version. But it did nothing to improve the story.

Overall, I'm completely underwhelmed with this title. There is a lot wrong and I feel like it needs another round of edits to point out where pacing could be picked up, characters could be developed, and story line could use some tweaks.

Author:

Rebecca Caffery is a BA Politics graduate and enthusiast, who can always be found curled up reading somewhere when she isn’t working on a new novel idea. She grew up in Birmingham, UK, where she’s been writing since the age of fourteen. It wasn’t, however, until she moved to Canada for a year that she found her voice and passion writing again and was inspired to write her first book.

As an author, Rebecca started her writing career in the Young Adult (YA) section. She is the author of the Contemporary YA Cherrington duology which features the two titles – Cherrington Academy and Coming Home.

Since then, she has completely stepped away from writing YA and her focus is now solely on writing Contemporary Adult Romance. She is the author of the soon-to-be-released Olympic Enemies (Feb 6th 2023)

She always has one too many ideas and often finds herself jotting them down in the middle of the night.

When she’s not writing you’ll find her either reading all the Sports/Adult Contemporary Romance or binge-watching (read: constantly rewatching) her Netflix faves such as Brooklyn 99, The Good Place, New Girl, and Lucifer. Outside of this, She is a BA Politics graduate and despite my degree being over I still have a vested political interest and am always keeping up to date with current affairs.

Where else to find her?

Twitter – @BeckaWrites
Instagram - @RJCafferyAuthor
Author Website - RebeccaJCaffery.com