Rating: 🤷🏻‍♀️/👍🏻

What happens when two people who butt heads from the start get stuck on a snowy mountain in a dangerous storm together and need to rely on each other for survival? And also they each have their own sets of trauma, there’s only one sleeping bag, and they’re both attracted to the other? The Edge of Never by Sarah Bailey tells us.

A few more details about the plot

Kit is an agender person reeling from a (platonic but messy af) breakup with their former best friend, Sienna, after they served as a surrogate for Sienna and her husband but miscarried. They decide they need time away for their thirtieth birthday, so they book a mountaineering course in Scotland despite being a little inexperienced. Thane is still grieving the loss of his wife two years ago and full of misplaced guilt over the circumstances of her death. He meets Kit while helping his buddy Callan teach the course, and they immediately do the opposite of kick it off. He’s assigned to help them since they’re the only person there without a partner. When it’s actual mountain climbing day, a heavy storm rolls in and they get separated from the rest of the group by an avalanche.

Let’s start with what I liked:

• The book gave us nonbinary, bisexual, asexual, and autism representation, and all of it felt consequential to the story. The details about the dysphoria Kit felt as a surrogate were relatable as hell to me as an agender person particularly. And the author didn’t mess up their pronouns once, which should be a given but frankly isn’t true of all of the books with nonbinary characters I’ve read this year.
• The emotional connection between Kit and Thane felt deep even after such a short time together. Which helped the happily ever after setup at the end of the book feel real as opposed to forced or rushed.

That said, here’s what didn’t work for me:

• The book was mostly dialogue. Some readers might prefer that. But I think I wanted some more action from a survival romance.
• I won’t spoil it, but the details about Kit’s mom felt… unnecessary? It almost felt like it was being treated as a big reveal in the way it was shared, but it didn’t seem to reveal anything about Kit except why they had no relationship with their mom. Characters are obviously allowed to have deeply tragic backstories, and also as a reader I expect those backstories to tell us something about who the character is at the time of the story. This piece felt superfluous and not fully connected to anything else in the book. It felt a little like Chekhov’s Tragic Backstory.
• The primary villain of the story (because there is a villain that isn’t the mountain/storm/avalanche situation) was super one-note. Knowing the author generally writes dark romance contextualized this for me, but the approach of having a Bad All Around Actual Villain (vs the Seems Bad But Isn’t As Bad Romance Option) we often see in dark romance doesn’t translate over as well into contemporary romance. While some people in life seem truly shitty all around, I wanted Sienna to feel a little more rounded. I feel like her betrayal would have actually hit harder if she also seemed capable of kindness or doing anything that didn’t benefit her own self-interest. I’m not saying she needed to be sympathetic, because the things she said were very much not ok. But because there seemed to be absolutely no redeeming qualities to Sienna, I had a hard time buying their friendship with Kit at all—which actually made that whole part of things fall flat for me. This is especially the case because the book opens in Sienna being terrible, with no evidence of their history.

All of which is to say: this book was ok. I liked parts of it enough to finish it, but I wouldn’t read it again or necessarily highly recommend it to others unless they specifically enjoyed dialogue-heavy books.