Hannah Grace

Icebreaker went out as a self-published book in 2022, spent months on bestseller lists, and was then picked up by a major publisher, which makes it a fairly clean case study in how BookTok rearranged romance publishing. Grace is British, and set it at the invented Maple Hills university, pairing a figure skater with the captain of the hockey team.

Wildfire and Daydream carried on in the same place with different couples. The external stakes are deliberately low and almost everything happens in dialogue, which is the point: these are written for readers who want a familiar trope done well, not subverted.