The Favorites Book Summary: A Layne Fargo Ice Dance Drama
Introduction
Two children meet at a frozen lake in Illinois and decide they belong to each other before they belong to anything else.
Layne Fargo’s The Favorites follows ice dancers Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha from a decaying farmhouse outside Chicago to Olympic arenas in Nagano, Vancouver, and Sochi.
The novel is told two ways at once: through Kat’s first-person account and through interview transcripts from a documentary about the pair.
Around them sits a sport that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, runs on legacy and manners, and turns private pain into public entertainment.
TL;DR
- What it is: A sports novel about two ice dancers from a poor background who fight the elite skating establishment, the media, and each other.
- How it’s told: Alternating chapters of Kat Shaw’s memoir and documentary-style interview transcripts from coaches, judges, journalists, and rivals.
- Central relationship: Kat and Heath are partners, soulmates, and each other’s worst trigger — their bond is described as obsession as often as love.
- Main forces against them: Legendary coach Sheila Lin, conservative judges, gossip blogs, and a rival willing to tamper with medication.
- Key themes: ambition and its cost, class barriers in elite sport, media consumption of women athletes, and maternal control passed down through generations.
- Scope: Five parts, 85 chapters, and an epilogue, spanning roughly the late 1980s to the 2010s.
Characters in This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Katarina “Kat” Shaw | American ice dancer and the novel’s first-person narrator, raised in poverty in Lake Forest, Illinois. |
| Heath Rocha | Kat’s childhood skating partner, a former foster child who follows her from Lake Michigan to the Olympics. |
| Sheila Lin | Two-time Olympic gold medalist, coach, and founder of the Lin Ice Academy in Los Angeles. |
| Isabella “Bella” Lin | Sheila’s daughter, Garrett’s twin, Kat’s rival, later her coach and co-parent to Heath’s child. |
| Garrett Lin | Sheila’s son, Kat’s partner during the “24-Karrett” years, and a closeted gay skater. |
| Ellis Dean | Former ice dancer who runs the gossip blog Kiss & Cry and narrates much of the documentary material. |
| Lee Shaw | Kat’s abusive older brother, who spends her inheritance and later dies of an overdose. |
| Kirk Lockwood | Sheila Lin’s former ice dance partner and an NBC Sports commentator. |
| Jane Currer | Traditionalist U.S. Figure Skating and IOC judge who penalizes Kat and Heath for their image. |
| Francesca Gaskell | Younger American competitor and pharmaceutical heiress who tampers with Heath’s medication. |
| Veronika Volkova | Sheila Lin’s Soviet-era rival and the coach who trains Heath in Russia. |
| Inez Acton | Feminist staff writer and former NBC correspondent who defends Kat’s public statements. |
| Nicole Bradford | Kat and Heath’s first coach in Illinois. |
| Zachary “Zack” Branwell | Bella’s partner after the twin split, whose career ends with a knee injury. |
The Favorites Summary:
Spoiler warning: This section recounts the plot in full, including the ending.
Katarina Shaw grows up in a rundown farmhouse in Lake Forest, Illinois. Her mother dies when she is four, leaving her with a volatile older brother, Lee, and a father who is largely absent.
After watching two-time Olympic champion Sheila Lin at the 1988 Calgary Games, Kat decides skating is the only way out. At ten, she meets Heath Rocha, a foster child who has already lived in six homes.
Heath watches her practice and she teaches him to skate on the frozen surface of Lake Michigan. They become ice dance partners under local coach Nicole Bradford.
When Heath is threatened with transfer to a distant foster home at thirteen, Kat vows they will stay together no matter what it takes. In 2000, at sixteen, they steal Lee’s pickup and drive to the U.S. Championships in Cleveland.
They place sixth, marked down by judges who see them as outsiders. Their chemistry, however, catches Sheila Lin’s attention, and she invites Kat to her summer intensive at the Lin Ice Academy in Los Angeles.
There, Kat and Heath train alongside Sheila’s twins, Isabella and Garrett. Kat clashes with and then befriends Bella, while Garrett — hiding his sexuality under his mother’s expectations — becomes a close ally.
The pair wins their first Grand Prix gold at Skate America in 2001. To keep paying for training after Lee spends Kat’s inheritance, Kat takes a secret modeling job with Garrett.
At the 2002 World Championships in Nagano, a jealous Heath fights with Kat before their free dance. Their performance collapses and they miss the podium.
Kat tells him he is holding her back. Heath disappears that night, and Sheila restructures the Academy: Kat is paired with Garrett, Bella with Zack Branwell.
For three years, “24-Karrett” dominates American ice dance with three national titles. Heath, meanwhile, spends three unexplained years training in Russia under Sheila’s former rival, Veronika Volkova.
In late 2005, Zack suffers a career-ending knee injury, and Bella secretly brings Heath back as her partner. When Kat sees them together, Heath kisses Bella on the ice to wound her, and a public war begins.
At the 2006 U.S. Championships in St. Louis, Kat collides with Bella in warm-up and hits her head. She competes anyway, concussed, and during a rotational lift her own blade slashes her palm.
Garrett loses his grip and Kat is thrown to the ice, cracking her skull. Heath vaults the boards, lifts her, and carries her off, abandoning Bella mid-competition.
Both teams withdraw and lose their places on the 2006 Torino Olympic team. A photograph of a blood-soaked Kat in Heath’s arms goes viral, making them pop-culture icons and launching the gossip site Kiss & Cry.
Reunited, Kat and Heath leave the Academy and travel as independents, working with ten coaches across five countries. They lean into their scandalous image, posing for ESPN’s Body Issue and skating provocative exhibition programs.
In 2009 they win their first World Championship, and Heath proposes on the ice in Cleveland. At a New York gala, Lee reappears, Kat slaps gossip blogger Ellis Dean during the confrontation, and Lee later dies of an overdose.
At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Kat tells an interviewer she wants no children and no traditional marriage — she wants to win. Hours before the final, Ellis publishes a post revealing that Sheila sent Heath to Russia.
Rattled, they take bronze. That night Kat finds Heath half-dressed in a room with Bella, attacks him, and ends things. She then confronts Sheila and realizes she was used as a pawn.
Kat quits skating and retreats to her childhood home. In January 2013, Sheila Lin dies suddenly, and Kat delivers a eulogy that praises her greatness while cataloguing her cruelty.
Bella, now retired and running the Lin Ice Academy, offers to coach Kat and Heath for one last run at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Kat agrees and learns Bella is pregnant with Heath’s child — a co-parenting arrangement, not a romance.
The Sochi season brings sabotage. Sequins are scattered on the ice in Moscow, threatening notes arrive in Sochi, and a razor blade hidden in Kat’s boot cuts her arch.
Kat discovers that American skater Francesca Gaskell, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, has conspired with Russian skater Dmitri Kipriyanov. Francesca swapped Heath’s heart medication for placebos to trigger a cardiac episode under stress.
Kat and Heath skate their free dance anyway, to “The Last Time,” and deliver the performance of their lives. As Kat kisses him at the end, Heath coughs blood and collapses onto the Olympic rings.
He survives, but toxicology screening picks up banned substances from the tampered medication. The IOC disqualifies Shaw and Rocha, strips their gold, and awards it to Francesca.
At the hearing in Lausanne, Kat refuses to participate in what she sees as a corrupt process and walks out with Heath. In the epilogue, the two live in Illinois with Bella and her daughter Mei, where Kat coaches at a renovated rink.
Without an official gold medal, Kat describes her life — love, autonomy, and daily work she chooses — as the better version of winning. Layne Fargo closes the documentary frame with Kat still refusing to be defined by the record books.
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Beneath the Surface: What the Novel Centers On
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
|---|---|
| Obsession and toxic intimacy | Kat and Heath carve their names into a headboard with a knife, and their partnership repeatedly spills into jealousy, physical fights, and public breakups. |
| The price of ambition | Kat skates through a concussion in St. Louis, hides injuries, and chooses competition over marriage and children when asked directly on television. |
| Media exploitation | A photo of an injured Kat carried off the ice goes viral, spawning a gossip blog that later publishes details of Heath’s Russia years before an Olympic final. |
| Class and institutional power | Training costs roughly $40,000 a year; Kat and Heath are marked down as “white trash” while the Lins and Francesca Gaskell have money, lawyers, and legacy standing behind them. |
| Maternal control and inherited damage | Sheila Lin manages her children’s careers and her students’ pairings, and Garrett and Bella spend their adult lives either imitating or escaping her. |
Who Should Read The Favorites?
The book suits readers of sports fiction who want the inside mechanics of elite competition — judging politics, funding, coaching changes, and training logistics — rather than a light romance.
It also fits readers drawn to messy, long-running relationships in which love and rivalry cannot be separated, and to stories where characters make damaging choices without becoming villains.
The dual structure — memoir chapters alternating with interview transcripts — will appeal to readers who enjoy documentary-style fiction and non-linear timelines. The narrative moves fast and jumps between decades.
Readers looking for a gentle redemption arc or a clean, uncontested happy ending should note that the novel resolves with a disqualification and an epilogue rather than a medal ceremony.
Books Like The Favorites
Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid — Uses the same oral history interview format to follow a talented, volatile creative partnership through fame and collapse.
Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid — Centers on an unapologetic female athlete returning for one last run and refusing to perform humility for the press.
Beartown by Fredrik Backman — Examines a small community, institutional loyalty, and what a high-stakes sports program protects and covers up.
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis — Follows an obsessive, unconventional competitor from childhood training through elite international play.
They Never Learn by Layne Fargo — Shares the author’s interest in driven women, concealed rage, and narratives that withhold information from the reader.
Temper by Layne Fargo — Another of Fargo’s novels about ambition, performance, and a consuming relationship between two people who need each other to succeed.
Book Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Contemporary fiction; sports fiction; psychological drama; oral history / mockumentary novel.
- Core Narrative Tropes: Childhood friends to lovers; toxic lovers; rivals to partners; toxic mentor-protégé; underdog versus dynasty; media stunt relationship.
- Tone & Atmosphere: Intense, claustrophobic, glossy but blood-stained; emotionally raw.
- Primary Conflict: Kat and Heath’s attempt to win Olympic gold while fighting institutional corruption, media intrusion, betrayal, and their own perfectionism.
- Pacing Style: Fast and non-linear, alternating short interview transcripts with reflective first-person chapters.
- ISBN: 978-0593732069 (ISBN-10: 0593732065)
- Pages: 496
- Book Structure: Five parts — The Hopefuls, The Rivals, The Champions, The Game, The Last Time — across 85 chapters plus an epilogue.
