Novel
The Catch
A Wild Beauty YA Novel — Wild Beauty Fiction, Young Adult
Aoife Ryan has one shot at the Irish national rowing team, and it's sitting two seats away in a boat she's not sure she can trust.
Corrib Rowing Club has never sent a girl to trials before. This year, with the European pathway finally opening up and a scout from an American university watching from the bank, everyone on the water wants it badly enough to lie about what they'd give up for it. Aoife wants it for herself, for once, after a year spent putting everyone else first. Fifteen-year-old Saoirse Nolan wants it enough to train through injuries she isn't telling anyone about, and enough to fall for exactly the wrong boy at exactly the wrong time. And the club's coach wants it enough that some of his choices about who races hurt — choices that go back twenty years, to a trial that never should have ended the way it did.
Seat by seat, the girls of Corrib are ranked against each other all summer, chasing the times that will decide who makes the national team and who watches from the stands. Somewhere in the middle of the sprint sessions and the seat races, Aoife falls for a boy she isn't supposed to want, Saoirse falls for a boy her best friend already claimed, and a twenty-year-old feud between two families threatens to capsize everything before either girl gets near Cork.
Training and competing across a summer that will decide their futures, they learn that the boat only goes as fast as the crew trusts each other — and that some races are won long before the start gun.
A romance-driven YA sports novel about rivalry, family, first love, and the girls who refuse to be the ones left on the dock.