Wildfire

I picked up Wildfire because Russ Callaghan stuck in my head after Icebreaker. He was the quiet freshman goalie at the edge of every hockey house scene, the guy whose mistake with a rival school set the whole shared rink plot in motion. I wanted his story. What I did not expect was a summer camp romance with barely any ice in it. This is Hannah Grace's 2023 novel from Atria Books, 400 pages in the standard print edition, and the second book in the Maple Hills series. It follows Russ and Aurora Roberts from a one night stand at an end of year party through a summer as counselors at Camp Honey Acres. What follows tells the whole story in order, ending included.

Russ is nineteen, a freshman at the University of California, Maple Hills, studying engineering and playing goalie for the Maple Hills Titans. He is tall, broad, quiet to the point that new people assume he is unfriendly. He is not. He is just careful with words and carries more than he says. His father has a gambling addiction that has chewed through the family's money and peace. His mother keeps making excuses for his dad. His brother keeps telling Russ that family comes first, which mostly means sending money home and showing up when called. Russ took the camp job partly for the pay and partly to get far enough away that nobody could ask him for anything for a few weeks.

Aurora, who goes by Rory with people she trusts, is twenty and everything Russ is not at first glance. She is loud, funny, bold, the girl who will do a dare before anyone finishes explaining it. She grew up with money and without attention. Her father is wealthy and distant, the kind of neglectful that looks fine from outside. Her parents divorced, her mother leans on her with guilt and complaints, and her older sister lives overseas, which leaves Aurora feeling like the leftover child. She acts out when she feels invisible. She knows this about herself and keeps doing it anyway, which is both the most honest and the most frustrating thing about her.

A party, a dare and a morning exit

The book opens at the end of the academic year. The hockey house throws a farewell party, the kind with cheap drinks, a crowded kitchen, and music loud enough to feel in your teeth. Aurora shows up with her best friend Emilia Bennett after closing the door on a casual fling. She came for a fun last night, nothing serious. Russ is there with his teammates, nursing a drink, watching more than talking. A drinking game pulls them into the same orbit. There is flirting, then a lap dance dare, then the kind of charged eye contact that everyone else at the party notices before they do.

They spend the night together. It matters that Grace writes Russ as nervous and sweet here rather than smooth. He keeps checking that Aurora is sure. She finds that surprising and disarming, since she walked in expecting a cocky athlete. The morning ruins it. Aurora wakes first, panics in the way people do when tenderness scares them, and slips out before Russ wakes up. She tells herself she never overstays her welcome and never expects much from men, so leaving first feels like control.

Russ wakes up to an empty bed and reads it the worst way. He decides he was out of her league and she lost interest, which is very Russ. He does not chase. She does not explain. They head into summer thinking that was a single night with a stranger whose full name they barely learned. Readers know better, because both of them took the same escape route. They signed on as counselors at Honey Acres, a summer camp a good distance from Maple Hills, and they arrive to find the other person standing in the same orientation circle.

Honey Acres and the rule that runs the summer

Honey Acres is the heart of the book, so it helps to picture it clearly. Cabins in pine trees, a lake with canoes, a craft lodge, a fire circle, kids yelling from breakfast to lights out. Aurora already loves the place. She went there as a kid and remembers it as the one spot where she felt at home when her family was falling apart. Russ chose it because it was far, it paid, and his roommate situation at school needed a break. He shares a staff cabin with Xander, a fellow counselor who becomes a genuine friend, the kind who does not pry and hands you coffee when you look rough.

Orientation day delivers the problem. Jenna Murphy, the camp director, lays down the law in the first staff meeting. No fraternizing between staff. Break the rule and you get sent home early. Jenna is not a cartoon villain about it. She runs a camp full of children and needs her counselors focused and drama free. The complication is that she is also Aurora's childhood mentor, someone Aurora has idolized since she was a camper. Aurora wants Jenna to be proud of her, which makes every bad choice feel heavier.

Then the assignments go up and Russ and Aurora land in the same counselor group. Same kids, same schedule, same dock duty, all summer. Their first days are painfully awkward. Russ goes cold and professional, which he thinks is respectful. Aurora reads it as rejection, more proof that men lose interest once they have what they want. She covers hurt with jokes and flirting with the distance of someone performing. He covers confusion with silence. The kids notice the tension before either adult admits it. Children always do.

I liked this setup more than the shared rink in Icebreaker, at least at first. A rink has schedules and coaches to hide behind. A camp has none of that. You eat together, run activities together, sit by the same fire, and handle homesick eight year olds together at midnight. Forced closeness does the work that willpower cannot. Within a week they are talking for real, and the version of Russ that Aurora meets on the dock is nothing like the guy she left sleeping. He is patient with nervous kids. He fixes a broken canoe paddle instead of reporting it. He remembers which camper needs a night light and which one needs to be tired out before bed.

Just friends, which fails exactly as expected

They agree to be friends. This lasts about as long as these pacts ever last. The friendship phase is honestly my favorite stretch of the novel. They trade histories in small pieces on night walks after the kids are asleep. Aurora tells camp stories from her childhood summers. Russ talks about engineering, about goalie drills, about how quiet the house feels when his dad is on a bad run. They learn each other's tells. Aurora talks faster when she is upset. Russ goes still. She starts checking on him instead of performing for him, and he starts looking at her like she is someone to keep.

The secret part starts because of the rule. They cannot date openly without risking their jobs, and Russ needs this job. His family situation means getting sent home would embarrass him, cost him pay he needs, and drop him back into the house he came here to escape. So they sneak. Stolen time in the equipment shed. A longer route back from the lake. Sitting apart at the fire while their knees touch where nobody can see. Grace is good at this specific tension, the thrill of almost being caught paired with the guilt of lying to people they respect, especially Jenna.

A note for readers coming from a certain direction. This is an open door adult romance with several explicit scenes between two consenting adults. I will leave the details to the book, but you should know they are there and they are frequent in the middle third. The scenes fit the characters. Aurora is confident about what she wants, Russ is eager and attentive, and their physical closeness is where both of them drop their defenses first. If you prefer closed door romance, this is not your book. If explicit content bothers you for other reasons, skip it. Nobody will judge you. There are plenty of romances with the doors shut.

The counselor friendships fill out the summer nicely. Xander is steady company for Russ. The rest of the staff form the usual camp mix of loud personalities and quiet ones, bonded fast by shared exhaustion. Emilia visits Aurora's orbit through calls and messages, the best friend who hears everything and gives advice that is half wise and half reckless. Friends from Maple Hills drift in and out of the story too, which fans of the first book will enjoy. The cameos never hijack the plot. They remind you these two have a real life waiting back at school.

Dads, money and the wounds they brought to camp

The middle of the book goes deeper than I expected, and this is where it earns its keep. Camp is supposed to be an escape, but family follows them in through their phones. Russ's father keeps calling. He needs money, then more money, then he is angry when Russ says no. The calls follow a script. Sweetness, pressure, then verbal abuse when the answer stays no. His mother defends his dad and asks Russ to keep the peace. His brother frames every refusal as disloyalty. You can feel Russ shrinking after each call. He is nineteen and carrying a grown man's debts in his head while trying to teach kids to tie knots.

Aurora's damage is quieter but just as heavy. Her father barely registers her existence except as an obligation. Her mother calls to complain and guilt trip, a running commentary on the divorce that makes Aurora feel responsible for an adult's happiness. Her sister being far away means there is nobody in the family who simply likes her without needing something. Aurora's response to all of this is to get louder. If nobody pays attention, she will do something worth noticing. She says this almost word for word at one point, and it landed hard for me because the book never treats it as cute. It treats it as a wound with a strategy attached.

What moves their relationship forward is that they witness each other's patterns without flinching. Russ sees Aurora pick a fight for attention and names it gently instead of walking away. Aurora sees Russ take a cruel phone call and sit with the shaking afterward, and she does not try to fix it with jokes. They start telling the truth about their families in stages, testing whether honesty gets punished. It does not, at least not between them. Jenna gives Aurora some mentor guidance here too, the kind of adult honesty Aurora never got at home. Those scenes are short and strong.

This is also where the hockey background matters in a sideways way. Russ being a goalie shapes his whole outlook. Goalies live with blame. A soft goal is yours even when the defense collapsed. Russ plays life the same way, absorbing fault that belongs to his father, his brother, the whole situation. Aurora, who grew up with nobody taking blame for anything, keeps handing him faults that are hers too. Watching them sort out which guilt actually belongs to whom is the emotional core of the book, and Grace handles it with more care than the genre usually demands.

Fights, miscommunication and the sag in the middle

Now the criticism, because this book needs some. Russ and Aurora literally describe themselves as miscommunicators, and they are right. The middle third runs on a loop. One of them gets scared, picks a fight or goes silent, the other reacts badly, they make up warmly, and then it happens again with the labels switched. The first two rounds feel true to the characters. By the fourth I was skimming arguments to get back to the plot. Aurora's attention seeking behavior in particular wears thin. There is a stretch where she keeps testing Russ to see if he will leave, and since readers know he will not, the scenes play as delay rather than drama.

The camp rule storyline also loses force through repetition. Every sneaking scene carries the same charge of risk, and after a while I stopped believing the risk. Jenna is strict but fair, and the book wants the threat of being sent home to feel constant. It does not, quite. Russ states the stakes clearly at the start, then keeps choosing Aurora, which tells you where it will land. That is fine for a romance. Readers want the couple together. But it means the middle relies on internal conflict, and internal conflict here is mostly the same fight reheated.

Readers should also reset expectations about hockey. Russ is a hockey player the way a teacher on summer break is still a teacher. It shapes him, his teammates matter to him, and the athlete discipline shows in how he works. But if you came for rink scenes, practices, and games, you will be disappointed. Almost everything happens at camp. One Goodreads reviewer put it bluntly and I agree. Do not go in expecting a hockey romance. Go in expecting a camp romance about a hockey player. That distinction sounds small and it changes everything about whether you enjoy the book.

The pacing around the explicit scenes contributes to the sag. There are a lot of them, and a few arrive right when an emotional conversation needs to happen instead. The couple keeps resolving fights physically before resolving them verbally, which is realistic for a passionate new relationship and frustrating in a novel. I found myself wishing one or two scenes had been cut in favor of a longer honest talk. The chemistry is strong. It did not need this much proof.

None of this sank the book for me, but it kept it a full step below Icebreaker. That book had external structure, a season, competitions, clear stakes that tightened on their own. This one has feelings and a lake. Feelings are enough when the writing is sharp, and much of the time it is. Grace writes banter well and writes shame even better. But the middle needed a firmer hand, either a bigger external event or fewer repeats of the same quarrel.

Choosing each other and heading home

The late chapters work because the conflicts finally become specific instead of circular. Russ's father pushes too far, and Russ has to decide in real time whether blood loyalty means endless payment. I will not spoil the exact exchange, but the important part is that Russ says no out loud and lets the consequences be what they are. His mother and brother do not applaud. That honesty matters. The book refuses the fantasy where one brave speech fixes a sick family. Russ draws a line and the line holds, and the family stays difficult. He goes back to camp lighter anyway, because the weight was the pretending.

Aurora gets her own version. She stops auditioning for her father's attention and her mother's approval in the same week, which sounds tidy and does not feel tidy on the page. There are ugly phone calls. She cries in a way that is not pretty. She admits to Jenna, and then to Russ, that some of her boldness is armor and some of it is habit, and she wants to tell the difference going forward. Her reconciliation with her sister starts rather than finishes, a few honest messages instead of a tearful airport scene. I respected that restraint. Not every wound closes by September.

The camp rule comes to a head as well, and the resolution is fair rather than contrived. I will leave the mechanics unspoiled. What matters is that both of them choose honestly instead of scheming, and Jenna responds like the mentor Aurora always believed she was. There are consequences but not cruelty, and the summer staff rallies in a way that feels earned by months of shared work rather than arranged for the finale.

The ending sends them back to Maple Hills together, which is the right call. No surprise elopement, no dramatic transfer, just two people returning to real life with a relationship that survived secrecy and family pressure. They plan to come back to Honey Acres the next summer, this time without hiding. Friends from school welcome them as a couple. The last scenes are warm without pretending the hard parts vanished. Russ still has a father with an addiction. Aurora still has parents who fail her. They face that with each other instead of performing around it.

So who should read this. If you loved Icebreaker for the friend group warmth, the banter, and the slow earned trust, you will find plenty to enjoy here. If you like summer camp settings, secret relationships, and romances where both people have real family damage to work through, this is a strong pick. Skip it or wait if you need lots of hockey, if open door scenes are not for you, or if repeated miscommunication drives you up the wall. For me it was a good book with a soft middle and a strong finish, carried by a hero worth rooting for and a heroine who tries, messes up, and tries again. Russ deserved his own story. He got one.