Tomorrow morning, the Wildcat varsity field hockey squad will play a scrimmage against the team that beat them in the Championship last year. Tonight is the team's sleepover, where the girls begin getting to know each other and form bonds - it's also when they get their varsity jerseys. That is until their Coach decides to twist the night up and make the team prove themselves. While the girls step out of their comfort zone, the cracks that were showing in the team open up to reveal secrets. Secrets that can change just what it means to be a Wildcat.

At first I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of POVs there were in the story. It took me a minute to get everyone straight. Siobhan Vivian did do a good job at really showing a high school team - their worries, pressures, celebrations, and relationships. All of these girls had different worries and concerns and Vivian was able to showcase them all.

I felt off about Coach almost when we first met him. I'm proud of the girls in the story for sticking together and helping each other see the wrong that was being done to them in multiple different ways and then sticking together to fight it. I know it's such a cliche to write girls hating on one another and that's slowly going away, but this book shows some strong female empowerment and friendships that's a good start.

I was a little let down by the ending. I get the author left it a bit open for the reader, but I was hoping for a bit more of a BANG and instead got a bit of a sparkler. ( )

I feel like VIvian is always walking right up to the edge with her characters but not setting up any real stakes for her characters. By the time we got to what the coach of the team actually did, it was almost a let down because some of it was downright benign and some of it was just a guy being a run-of-the-mill loser. I don't think every story has to explore the worst things that can happen to every teenager in every situation, but when so many teenage girls are facing such devastating abuse from high school and college athletic coaches and doctors right now, the book seems like a long walk to find out that the guy accidentally hit a girl in the face with a water bottle and cared about his own career more than his students. His texting and lying to colleges was bad, but I'm honestly not even sure that any of this would get a public school coach fired.

I think if this is the only book you've ever read by the author, it'll seem fine, but after reading half a dozen novels by her where high school girls keep their torrid Kissing Affairs a secret from their best friend or whatever, it just starts to feel out of touch with the way 15-17 year old girls actually act and talk to each other, and certainly with the way adult men behave toward teenage girls.

I also felt it was awkward that there were 20 girls in this story but we only hear from 5, and the other 15 are present the entire time but go largely unnamed, never speak a word, and don't perform any actions while this giant mass of girls are hanging out together. This book is about how important it is to be a team and do everything for the team and stay together as a team but there's 15 team members who are apparently present in every single scene but never say or do anything?

The book is bound to draw comparisons to Quan Barry's 'We Ride Upon Sticks,' which is another field hockey novel from 2020 and is far superior. We get to hear from every single member of the team, each of them go through character development and participate in the plot, and we get to see how they work together and how they function as a team. Not only that, but while Barry's book features LGBT characters, Vivian's high school field hockey novel is completely devoid of lesbians, which is absolutely unrealistic for a high school field hockey team. Trust me, I'm a lesbian. ( )