Book Review - Melting Point by Cici Williams

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Title: Melting Point

Author: Cici Williams

Format reviewed: Ebook

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Avon

Publication Date: 4th December 2025

Rating: 3 Stars

There’s a Winter Olympic medal on the line. But their toughest challenge is resisting each other…

February 2026: the Italian Winter Olympics. The only thing on Sam Harrington’s mind is winning her first medal for snowboarding.

Enter Finn Bradley. They've had a 'friends forever' pact for, well, forever, so Sam pushes her growing feelings aside and tries to focus on training.

But when a major team sponsorship falls through, Sam needs to find funding, and fast. When they're told that pretending to be a couple will give them a better chance at finding sponsors, Sam and Finn agree to fake a relationship. They spend all their time together already, surely pretending to be a couple won't be a slippery slope…

There's only one problem. Finn's secretly been in love with her for years, and this Olympic season, he's decided that as well as a medal, he wants to win Sam over.

Chalet Girl meets Stephanie Archer in this spicy, fake dating, friends-to-lovers sports romance you need this Winter!

This was an enjoyable winter sports romance, that just feel a bit short for me. 

I was excited when I realised the book was set at the 2026 Winter Olympics, and I know it was written before the Olympics, but from the bit where they had the Livigno based athletes at the San Siro, and the fact that it seemed like the number of runs in qualifiers and the finals for both of Finn and Sam's disciplines being inaccurate, it just felt like not quite enough research had been done for this. 

Had it been in a clearly fictionalised Winter Olympics setting I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but although the opening ceremony I can forgive - there just wasn't enough sport in it for my liking, given how much I love watching Big Air, Half Pipe and Slopestyle in both Skiing and Snowboard and do tend to remember the basics between each games, it was a tad disappointing. 

And although there is fake dating which is one of my favourite tropes it was barely realised, touched upon apart from social media pictures.  It just fell a tad flat for me. 

Although there are some rather spicy scenes, that definitely had me heating up even more than I already was, reading this in a heatwave! 

I was though enjoying the book, it was a perfectly pleasant read, I had just hoped it would hit me a lot differently.  

I absolutely adored though Maya, her captions to go with the pics she is taking of Finn and Sam, and the way she was dealing with Gabe too.  She was fabulous and someone I really enjoyed any time she was in a chapter.  

I also loved the descriptions of Finn's hotel room, and also all the descriptions of the town of Livigno. The various shops and restaurants, and some of Finn and Sam's friends.  Sam's family on the other hand left me rather cold as they were meant to.   

This is a real will they, won't they sort of a romance and I ultimately wanted to bang their heads together, before watching their bodies bang! 

This is a debut novel, and odds are had I not known anything about these sports (and I don't know huge amounts), I would have actually enjoyed this more, and I really wanted to.  I did feel very compelled to discover if either of our leads did manage to win Gold medals and I was cheering them on, in their hopes for sponsorship deals and to break away from their nightmare coach too! 

Thank you to Avon and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.