{"id":14291,"date":"2026-02-26T02:52:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T02:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=14291"},"modified":"2026-02-26T02:52:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T02:52:42","slug":"heated-rivalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/heated-rivalry\/","title":{"rendered":"Heated Rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(by Rachel Reid)<\/p>\n<p>OK, this one was more my speed than <i>Game Changer<\/i> was. And I mean, I liked <i>Game Changer<\/i>, but I feel like Scott and Kip both have such golden retriever energy. Like, so earnest and eager and wholesome. And that&#8217;s fun and all, but the Shane\/Ilya dynamic of rivals who hook up + oops this was supposed to just be physical and then everybody caught feelings hits more for me: the obsessiveness of it, the way they both keep thinking they&#8217;ll end it, the way they keep coming back to one another for years. (Tangentially, I&#8217;ve been  listening to Charli XCX&#8217;s <i>Wuthering Heights<\/i> album a whole lot lately, and this book kept making me think of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=AHm1i212UP4\">this song<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p>I will refrain from plot summary because at this point you probably know the plot. I do like the structure of this one, how it starts in 2016 and you quickly learn that Shane and Ilya have been hooking up for more than half a decade at this point, and how then the narrative jumps back to the first time they met and moves forward from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(by Rachel Reid) OK, this one was more my speed than Game Changer was. And I mean, I liked Game Changer, but I feel like Scott and Kip both have such golden retriever energy. Like, so earnest and eager and wholesome. And that&#8217;s fun and all, but the Shane\/Ilya dynamic of rivals who hook up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14291"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14297,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14291\/revisions\/14297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}