Wheels Down at Starlight Skate
A Novel

About this book:

Robin Vance has spent twenty-three years keeping Starlight Skate spinning—polyurethane-perfect floors, rentals laced tight, the neon star turning overhead like a lighthouse for the misfits and derby queens who call this rink home. But the back taxes are due, the pipes are groaning, and Grandpa Artie's Hail Mary is a sub-lease to the one thing Robin swore would never touch their maple: ice skaters. Enter Laurel, pink-haired and razor-focused, dragging her off-ice frames and a mother who reads contracts like weaponry. She needs four hours of silence, fifty-eight degrees, and a floor that doesn't fight her triple loops. Robin needs the rent paid and their sanctuary left alone. Neither expects the other to stay.

What starts as a war of wheel guards versus toe stops becomes something far more dangerous: early mornings shared in the glow of the snack bar sign, the scrape of blades learning the language of quads, a grudging respect that softens into midnight conversations on the center star. But the bank doesn't care about fragile truces, and the foreclosure clock is ticking. To save Starlight, they'll have to build something neither believed possible—a show that puts roller grace on ice technique, a fundraiser that makes the city pay attention, and a partnership that rewrites every rule they've skated by.

*Wheels Down at Starlight Skate* is a love letter to the rinks that raise us, the chosen families who keep the lights on, and the terrifying, exhilarating moment you realize your rival is the only one who matches your stride. Lace up. The floor is yours.