A Ruthless Female Lead Who Refuses to Be Redeemed: The Favorites Review

She’s Mean, Ambitious, and Honestly? Good for Her.

There’s a point while reading The Favorites where you start to wonder if it’s ever going to stop.

Not in a bad way. Not exactly.

More like, you’ve been dragged across cities, lovers, rivalries, betrayals, and emotional wreckage, all orbiting the same glittering, punishing world of competitive ice dancing. At a certain point, you’re like: okay… enough. I am tired. These people have got to be tired. They’re pushing thirty years old, for fuck’s sake. Wrap it up.

And then it ends, and somehow, you’re more impressed than you expected to be.

That’s the trick of this book. It exhausted me and won me over anyway.

At its core, The Favorites is about obsession. Not the soft, romantic kind. The kind that consumes your life, rearranges your priorities, and dares anyone around you to keep up or get out of the way. It’s about ambition, toxic relationships, and the kind of tunnel vision that makes “healthy” feel like a boring afterthought.

What makes it feel almost subversive is how little the novel cares about making any of this palatable.

There are no clean boundaries, no careful language of self-awareness, no neat moral resolution at the end. The characters are messy, often cruel, and rarely, if ever, sincerely apologetic. The book is dazzling in that way. It commits fully to the chaos.

At the center is an ambitious female protagonist who refuses to soften.

She is obsessive, driven, and completely cutthroat. She pushes people aside, partners, lovers, anyone, if they get in the way of what she wants. And instead of punishing her for it or forcing some late-stage emotional awakening, the story simply lets her be that way.

Which feels almost radical.

We are used to stories where ambitious women have to learn a lesson. They have to become more balanced, more relational, more aware of the cost. Men get to want things. Women get arcs about wanting things too much.

This book skips that.

She wants what she wants. She prioritizes her goals over her relationships. And the question becomes: what, exactly, is wrong with that?

That’s where The Favorites is at its strongest.

The writing evolves alongside the characters. Early on, it feels more restrained, which makes sense given their age, but there’s a noticeable shift as they grow up. The tone deepens, sharpens, and becomes more comfortable in the mess. By adulthood, the novel fully leans into moral grayness, ugliness, and the reality that people are not clean, well-adjusted versions of themselves.

They’re complicated. They’re selfish. They’re human.

Still, the book does test your stamina.

There’s a kind of emotional oversaturation that builds. The constant movement, new locations, new partners, new iterations of the same obsessive drive, starts to blur together. It’s fun at first, but eventually it feels like too much of the same intensity, all centered around the world of ice dancing. You don’t lose interest, but you do start to feel worn down by it.

Which is maybe the point.

Or maybe it just needed to end a little sooner.

Either way, it lands.

The Favorites delivers a portrait of a woman who is messy, mean, unapologetic, and entirely devoted to her ambition, and it never asks her to be anything else.

Read it on vacation.
Read it in your luteal phase.
Read it when you’re in the mood to watch the world burn.

Love cold characters? Definitely check out this book. It’ll stay with you for a long time.