I have read a great many sports romances over the years, and I say this as someone who spent the better part of a decade reviewing literary fiction for a living before the genre romance world finally pulled me in with the kind of gravitational force you simply cannot argue with. But I had not read anything quite like Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh until I did. What unsettled me first was how unshowy it is. There are no clever structural conceits, no stylized prose meant to announce itself. Walsh writes with the quiet authority of someone who lived adjacent to her characters, and it shows in every unadorned, emotionally devastating line.
The novel, first self-published in 2018 and the opening entry in the now-six-book Boys of Tommen series, follows Shannon Lynch and Johnny Kavanagh through the corridors of an Irish private school. Shannon is one of the most authentically fragile heroines I have encountered in new adult fiction: not fragile in the decorative, aesthetically appealing way the genre sometimes permits, but fragile in the way that manifests as physical illness, social withdrawal, and an almost pathological distrust of kindness. Johnny, meanwhile, is the golden boy who carries secret weight, a rising rugby star negotiating a serious injury with the same forced composure he applies to everything else in his life. What Walsh accomplishes between them is a friendship that becomes something more through accumulated gesture rather than dramatic declaration. It is, at its core, a novel about two people learning to receive care.
The Boys of Tommen series has become a genuine cultural moment. It exploded on BookTok and has since been translated into multiple languages, with a television adaptation announced for Amazon. But cultural success alone does not explain the intensity of its readership. People respond to Binding 13 the way they respond to literature that says something true about suffering: with relief and recognition.
So when readers finish it and surface, blinking and wrecked, asking for what to read next, the challenge is not simply finding another slow-burn sports romance. It is finding books that share Binding 13‘s particular architecture: the patience, the weight, the moral seriousness beneath the romantic surface. What follows is my curated selection of fifteen books that deliver on one or more of those essentials. I have grouped them by the kind of reader each will best serve, because not every Binding 13 reader is looking for the same thing.
For Readers Who Need Their Romance to Cost Something
These are the readers who stayed up until 3 a.m. not because the plot was racing forward but because they were afraid to leave Shannon and Johnny. They want emotional stakes that feel real. They want love that is earned through patience and vulnerability, not manufactured through misunderstanding and dramatic coincidence.
Waking Olivia by Elizabeth O’Roark
I want to lead with this one because it is, in my view, the single most underread book in the new adult space, and it shares more spiritual DNA with Binding 13 than almost anything else I can name. O’Roark, a former medical writer who brings a clinician’s eye for precise detail to her fiction, introduces Olivia Finnegan as a college track athlete arriving at a smaller school after a scandal at her previous institution. She is not sympathetic in any conventional sense. She is hard-edged, self-destructive, and constitutionally resistant to being helped.
What makes the book remarkable is that O’Roark refuses to soften Olivia for the reader’s comfort. Like Shannon Lynch, Olivia carries trauma in her body as well as her mind, and the novel is sophisticated enough to understand that these are not the same thing. The forbidden romance between Olivia and her young track coach, Will, unfolds with the same careful deliberateness Walsh employs, every moment of connection earned through genuine risk rather than narrative convenience. The prose is economical in the best sense, each chapter ending with the kind of precision that makes you immediately turn the page. If you loved Binding 13 for its restraint and its refusal to give you what you wanted before you were ready for it, O’Roark’s novel is essential reading.
Normal by Danielle Pearl
Danielle Pearl’s Normal occupies similar emotional territory to Binding 13 in its central concern: what does healing look like for a young woman who has experienced abuse, and what role can an unlikely male protector play without that role collapsing into simple saviorism? Pearl handles this balance with more care than the genre typically manages. Her heroine, Rory, arrives at a new life in New York carrying the aftermath of an abusive relationship, and the football star Sam who gradually enters her orbit is written with the same empathetic complexity that Walsh brings to Johnny Kavanagh.
What I respect most about Normal is its title, which functions as both aspiration and irony. Rory’s deepest longing is not for romance but for the ordinary texture of a life undistorted by fear, and Pearl never lets the reader forget it. The book understands something Binding 13 also understands: that for a survivor, the most radical act is simply learning to exist without bracing for impact.
Heartache and Hope by Jay McLean
Jay McLean is an Australian author with a feel for emotional devastation that crosses geographic borders effortlessly, and Heartache and Hope is her most nakedly vulnerable work. McLean writes the kind of slow-burn romance where the relationship’s development is almost secondary to the interior lives of her characters, which is precisely why it resonates with readers who respond to Walsh’s character-driven approach. The dual perspective structure, which Binding 13 also employs, allows McLean to show how two damaged people can orbit each other for a long time without ever quite making contact, and when they finally do, the payoff is proportional to the wait.
McLean’s greatest skill is her ability to render found-family dynamics with genuine warmth rather than sentimentality, which puts her squarely in the tradition Walsh establishes in Tommen, where the rugby team and its social ecosystem function as a kind of chosen kinship.
For Readers for Whom the Playing Field Is Never Just a Game
Sport in Binding 13 is not mere backdrop. Rugby carries weight: it is the source of Johnny’s identity, the pressure that shapes his choices, and the metaphor through which Walsh explores masculine vulnerability. These readers want sport written the same way, as a lens through which character is revealed rather than a setting that lends the romance atmosphere.
Unsteady by Peyton Corinne
Peyton Corinne is one of the more interesting voices to emerge in sports romance in the last few years, and Unsteady, the first in her Waterfell University series, demonstrates exactly why. Her male lead, Rhys Koteskiy, is the captain of a college hockey team navigating PTSD and panic attacks following a traumatic incident on the ice. The specificity of his injury, both physical and psychological, echoes the authenticity Walsh brings to Johnny’s undisclosed groin injury, which he continues to play through at enormous personal cost.
What Corinne does particularly well is show the way elite athletic culture creates a particular kind of silence around male pain. Athletes are taught to absorb injury and continue, and that same conditioning makes it extraordinarily difficult for Rhys to ask for help in any other area of his life. When he meets Sadie Brown, a figure skater managing her own heavy responsibilities, the connection that develops is rooted not in attraction but in mutual recognition of that silence. For readers who found the rugby culture of Tommen to be one of the novel’s most compelling elements, Unsteady delivers the same layered understanding of what sport does to the people who love it.
Scoring Wilder by R.S. Grey
R.S. Grey occupies a different register than Walsh, leaning into wit and romantic comedy in a way that Binding 13 emphatically does not, but Scoring Wilder earns its place on this list through the seriousness of its athletic world-building. Grey’s heroine, Kinsley Bryant, is a national soccer team player navigating a training camp environment where she is explicitly forbidden from pursuing anything romantic with the coaching staff. The slow burn here is driven less by trauma and more by genuine professional constraint, which Grey deploys with intelligence.
What connects Scoring Wilder to Binding 13 is its understanding that sport creates a specific social universe with its own hierarchies, rules, and moral codes, and that love often develops in opposition to, or despite, those structures. Grey’s writing is considerably lighter in tone, but the emotional authenticity of the athletic experience is never sacrificed for comic effect.
Mile High by Liz Tomforde
The first entry in Tomforde’s Windy City series follows Zander, a star hockey player with a carefully constructed public persona, and Stevie, a curvy flight attendant with her own complicated relationship to self-image. Tomforde is particularly skilled at writing male characters whose bravado is clearly a performance masking genuine emotional investment, which places her in good company with Walsh’s Johnny Kavanagh. The book’s willingness to address mental health, body image, and the specific pressures of professional athletics as genuine narrative concerns rather than plot decoration gives it more depth than its rom-com energy might initially suggest.
The Windy City series has quietly become one of the more substantive sports romance franchises in contemporary fiction, and Mile High is its strongest opening argument.
For Readers Who Understand That Surviving Is Its Own Kind of Love Story
Binding 13 is, at its structural core, a novel about domestic abuse and what it does to a child’s capacity for trust. Shannon’s father Teddy is not a peripheral villain; he is an omnipresent atmospheric pressure that shapes every choice his daughter makes. These readers want that seriousness honored. They want books that do not use abuse as dramatic shorthand but engage with it as the complex, body-lodged reality it is.
Reason to Breathe by Rebecca Donovan
Published in 2012 and the first book in Donovan’s Breathing series, Reason to Breathe remains one of the most unflinching depictions of domestic abuse in the young adult and new adult crossover space. Its heroine, Emma Thomas, lives in a household where abuse is hidden beneath the surface of suburban respectability, and Donovan renders the specific psychology of that concealment with painful accuracy: the performance of normalcy, the calibration of behavior to avoid triggering violence, the profound difficulty of accepting kindness from someone who expects nothing in return.
Evan Mathews, the romantic lead, is in some ways a template for the kind of protective male presence Walsh perfects in Johnny Kavanagh. What sets Reason to Breathe apart from lesser books in this space is that Donovan never conflates rescue with love. The narrative understands that no single relationship, however genuine, can substitute for the long work of healing. Published over a decade before Binding 13 found its audience, it reads today as a forerunner of the same ethical and emotional concerns Walsh would bring to her Cork setting.
Wait for You by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Armentrout is one of the most commercially successful authors working in new adult romance, and Wait for You is the book that best demonstrates why her reach exceeds what critics sometimes dismiss as genre formulaic. Her heroine, Avery, arrives at college explicitly to outrun a traumatic past, and Armentrout is careful to show that outrunning is not the same as escaping. The slow development of Avery’s relationship with Cam Hamilton is structured around his patience and her pace rather than his desire and his timing, which is a more careful arrangement than the genre usually bothers to make.
What I admire about Armentrout here is her sense of humor, deployed not to lighten the darkness but to render it survivable. Avery is funny when she is not frightened, which makes the moments when she is frightened hit harder by contrast. Walsh uses similar tonal modulation in Binding 13, where the genuine warmth and humor of the teenage ensemble makes Shannon’s home life feel more devastating by contrast.
Home Game by Odette Stone
Stone’s Home Game is lesser known than the others on this list, and it deserves considerably more attention. Its heroine, Zoey, arrives in the orbit of professional hockey player Ryan Scott under circumstances that leave her genuinely vulnerable rather than strategically helpless, and Stone never allows Ryan’s wealth or status to become the comfort it might in a less thoughtful author’s hands. The novel is careful about power dynamics in a way that speaks directly to the concerns of readers who appreciated Walsh’s measured approach to Johnny’s protectiveness.
“Stone understands something rare in the sports romance genre: that a hero’s power to protect is only as meaningful as his willingness to sit quietly while someone heals at their own pace.”
The book has found a dedicated audience among readers who cycle through the Boys of Tommen series repeatedly, and I understand why.
For Readers Drawn to Love Stories Where the Real Villain Is the Self
In Binding 13, both Shannon and Johnny are, in different ways, obstacles to their own happiness. Shannon’s trauma makes trust feel like danger. Johnny’s ambition makes connection feel like distraction. These readers want books where the love story’s primary antagonist is not an external force but the characters’ own complicated inner lives.
Addicted to You by Krista and Becca Ritchie
The Ritchie sisters built an entire universe around a deceptively simple premise: what if two people who were genuinely in love were also genuinely dangerous to each other because of what they each carried? Lily Calloway is a sex addict. Loren Hale is an alcoholic. For years they have maintained a fake relationship to cover their respective addictions, giving each other cover while quietly enabling each other’s destruction.
Addicted to You is, on its surface, a romance. But the Ritchies are doing something more interesting than romance: they are writing about the way love and self-destruction can inhabit exactly the same space, which is a concern Binding 13 touches on in its depiction of the Lynch family’s dynamics and Shannon’s own learned helplessness. The series has grown into a massive extended saga that follows multiple characters through recovery and relapse, and it remains one of the most honest extended explorations of addiction in popular fiction. The Ritchies never flinch, which is the only way to do this subject justice.
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
I know what you are thinking, and I want to address it directly: Beautiful Disaster is a polarizing novel, and not without reason. Its romantic hero, Travis Maddox, is written with a possessiveness that the narrative does not always adequately interrogate, and the book has been the subject of legitimate critical debate about what it normalizes. I include it here not as an unqualified recommendation but because it shares with Binding 13 a quality that is genuinely rare: the ability to make a reader feel the magnetic pull between two people as a force that bypasses rational judgment entirely.
Walsh captures this in the early chapters of Binding 13 with extraordinary restraint. McGuire captures it with considerably less restraint, which is precisely her appeal and her limitation. Readers who found themselves simultaneously frustrated and compelled by Binding 13‘s tension will recognize that same bittersweet experience in McGuire’s work, even if the execution is less controlled. Read it as a cultural artifact of the new adult moment as much as a novel, and it becomes considerably more interesting.
Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover
Colleen Hoover has become the most discussed popular fiction author in America over the last several years, and the discourse around her work sometimes obscures the genuine craft in her best novels. Ugly Love is, I think, her most structurally inventive book, alternating between two timelines in a way that builds dramatic irony with real patience. Its premise, a no-strings arrangement that neither participant can maintain as agreed, is familiar, but Hoover’s execution reveals something genuinely true about how people use stated rules to avoid confronting what they actually feel.
What connects Ugly Love to Binding 13 is its understanding that emotional unavailability is not simply a character flaw but a survival strategy, and that dismantling it requires something more difficult than attraction. The parallel timeline structure, which slowly discloses the backstory that explains the present-day behavior, is more sophisticated than Hoover typically receives credit for. She was doing something formally interesting here while most of her readers were simply crying.
For Readers Who Trust in the Architecture of a Long Slow Burn
Binding 13 runs well over six hundred pages and asks for extraordinary patience from its reader. The romantic payoff is proportional to that patience, but it requires a reader who genuinely believes that a love story is better when you have had time to understand why these two people specifically need each other. These readers do not want shortcuts.
The Deal by Elle Kennedy
Elle Kennedy is the gold standard of college sports romance, and The Deal, the first in her Off-Campus series, is where she established exactly what that standard looks like. Her heroine, Hannah, is a music major with a traumatic past who strikes a bargain with hockey star Garrett Graham: she tutors him in exchange for his help making her crush notice her. The transactional premise is a classic, but Kennedy’s execution is several cuts above the average.
What sets The Deal apart, and what connects it to Binding 13, is Kennedy’s insistence on full character interiority. Hannah’s past is not a plot device; it shapes every interaction she has with Garrett, and Kennedy traces the process of trust-building with the same granularity that Walsh brings to Shannon’s cautious opening toward Johnny. The banter is sharper and the pacing is faster than Binding 13, but the emotional seriousness is comparable, and the hockey world is rendered with genuine specificity.
All Rhodes Lead Here by Mariana Zapata
Mariana Zapata has built a devoted readership almost entirely through word of mouth, which tells you something important about what she offers: a reading experience so immersive and emotionally satisfying that readers feel compelled to press the book into someone else’s hands the moment they finish. All Rhodes Lead Here, a contemporary romance set in a small Colorado mountain town, is her most accessible entry point.
The slow burn here is almost archeologically patient. Aurora comes to stay in a rental property owned by Amos Rhodes, a former professional hockey player now living a quieter life, and the relationship that develops does so through accumulated shared experience rather than narrative engineering. Zapata understands, as Walsh understands, that sustained proximity is a more romantic device than drama. What she does with the found-family elements of the story, particularly the relationship between Aurora and Amos’s teenage son, echoes the warmth Walsh creates in the Tommen ensemble.
If Binding 13 made you realize you had been settling for fast burns your whole reading life, Zapata is your new author.
Rock Hard by Nalini Singh
Nalini Singh is best known for her paranormal romance work, but her contemporary romances deserve to be evaluated entirely on their own terms. Rock Hard, the second book in her Hard Play series, follows Charlotte Baird, a personal assistant with a history of trauma, and Gabriel Bishop, her demanding boss. The power imbalance is obvious and intentional, and Singh handles it with more psychological sophistication than the billionaire-boss premise usually receives.
What makes Rock Hard relevant to the Binding 13 reader is Singh’s insistence on showing trauma’s ongoing effects rather than treating recovery as a single narrative event. Charlotte does not simply decide to trust Gabriel; she learns to trust him through specific, repeated demonstrations that her boundaries will be honored, which is exactly the kind of painstaking relational development Walsh portrays in Shannon and Johnny’s arc. Singh’s prose is warmer and more overtly romantic than Walsh’s, but the underlying ethical commitment to showing what real care looks like is the same.
A Final Word
What I return to, when I think about Binding 13 and what makes it singular, is its conviction that the time between two people matters as much as the arrival. Walsh does not rush toward the love story because she understands that the love story is already happening in the long before, in every small act of recognition and restraint. The books I have recommended here share that conviction to varying degrees and in various forms, but all of them understand something the best romance fiction always understands: that love is not the climax of the story. It is the story, happening quietly, in the accumulation of ordinary moments, while the reader holds their breath and waits.
The fifteen books above are not substitutes for Binding 13. Nothing quite is. But each one of them will honor the emotional investment you made on the first read, and some of them will surprise you in ways you did not expect. That, ultimately, is what good fiction is supposed to do.