The Clinch Review | Nicole Disney | Is It Worth Reading?

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Verdict: The rare sports romance where the sport is written as well as the love story — an award-winning MMA rivals-to-lovers about two women who are contractually obliged to try to knock each other out. Best for: Readers who want high-stakes rivals-to-lovers with real physical craft on the page, a warm supporting cast, explicit heat, and a happily-ever-after that arrives without a manufactured third-act breakup. Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4.3/5 — fully explicit and open-door once it starts, though the dirty talk divides readers sharply) Rating: ★★★★★ (4.5/5 — a 4.43 Goodreads average, a Foreword INDIES Silver medal, and a Goldie finalist placing) Tropes: Rivals-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, sports romance, forced proximity, closeted love interest, found family, hurt/comfort, mentor figure, single POV, mild age gap, guaranteed HEA. The Clinch by Nicole Disney is a contemporary lesbian sports romance from Bold Strokes Books in which Eden Bauer — the undefeated UFC featherweight champion, raised in a Bronx dojang because home was not safe — meets Brooklyn Shaw, the loud, showboating Brazilian jiu-jitsu prodigy who has arrived in her division to take the belt off her. They are each other’s biggest obstacle. They are also, inconveniently, the only person in the sport who understands what the other one is. It holds a 4.43 average across roughly 1,430 Goodreads ratings — one of the highest in contemporary lesbian romance — won a Foreword INDIES Silver medal in 2021, and reached the Goldie finals in 2022. And it does something almost nothing else in the genre manages: it converts people who do not like sports romance.

What Is The Clinch About?

The Clinch is a standalone — no cliffhanger, no required reading order, and a complete happily-ever-after inside one 288-page book. It is narrated entirely in first person by Eden, which turns out to be the single most consequential craft decision in the novel and the one readers argue about most. Eden Bauer is twenty-seven and holds the UFC featherweight title without a loss on her record. She came up through Taekwondo at a neighbourhood dojang run by a master named Jin, who took her in when her own house was not survivable, and she still teaches there — including a teenage fighter named Laila and a twelve-year-old boy named Mateo whose home life is going the same way hers did. Brooklyn Shaw is twenty-two, biracial, and the youngest of a legendary Brazilian jiu-jitsu family; her brother corners her, her talent is genuine, and her mouth writes cheques the promotion is delighted to cash. The rivalry sells. What Eden slowly works out is that the person doing the trash talk and the person underneath it are not the same, and that Brooklyn is carrying a family that would not accept who she is.

What Makes This Sapphic Sports Romance Work

• The fight writing: The most-praised element by a very wide margin, and the reason the book has the reputation it does. The choreography is legible round by round, and reviewers describe reading it at the edge of the seat rather than skimming to get back to the romance.
• It converts sports-romance sceptics: An unusual number of the top Goodreads reviews open by disclaiming any interest in MMA and then rate it five stars anyway. Lex Kent’s review begins with the flat admission, “I’m not a MMA kind of girl.” That pattern is the book’s real word of mouth.
• Two physically dominant women: The eroticism runs on something specific — both leads are the strongest person in most rooms, and the intimacy works because each chooses to stop being that with the other. Reviewers name this repeatedly as what makes the chemistry land.
• The author actually trains: Disney is a martial arts instructor, student and competitor who has said she was training at her MMA gym for two to four hours most days while drafting the book. It is legible on the page in the details that cannot be researched.
• The supporting cast: Jin, Laila and Mateo give the novel an emotional floor underneath the title fight. Several reviewers report crying, and almost none of them are crying about the romance.
• No manufactured third-act breakup: The book builds to its climax without the obligatory late blowup that romance readers brace for. Hsinju’s Lit Log singles this out precisely — “a wonderful build and exciting climax, without a sudden conflict.”

Book Synopsis

Eden Bauer has never lost. She is the UFC featherweight champion, she is disciplined to the point of austerity, and she owes all of it to a Taekwondo school in the Bronx that gave her somewhere to be when her own home could not. She trains there, she teaches there, and she has arranged her entire life around not going back to what she came from. Then Brooklyn Shaw signs with the promotion. Twenty-two, Brazilian jiu-jitsu royalty, and constitutionally incapable of being quiet, Brooklyn arrives in Eden’s division announcing exactly what she intends to do to Eden’s record. The promotion loves it. The press loves it. Eden does not — until proximity starts doing what proximity does, and she begins to see how much of Brooklyn’s noise is armour, and what specifically it is armouring. Because Brooklyn’s family is not going to accept her. The same family that built her into a fighter is the reason she cannot be out, and the closer she and Eden get, the more the fight that matters stops being the one inside the cage. Eden has spent her adult life making sure she never needs anyone. Brooklyn has spent hers making sure nobody looks too closely. Somewhere between the training camps, the press obligations and a title bout that is still on the calendar, they have to work out whether two people can want each other and want the same belt. What follows is a romance that takes the sport seriously — the cutting, the corners, the politics of matchmaking, the specific loneliness of being at the top — and takes its characters seriously too. The book ends where a romance should end, with both women intact and together, and without asking anyone to give up who they are to get there.

My Review

Most sports romances treat the sport as a costume. The characters are athletes the way characters in other romances are architects — it explains the schedule and the body and very little else. The Clinch does not do this. The MMA is the book. Nicole Disney is a martial arts instructor who was training two to four hours a day while she wrote it, and the difference between a writer who has researched a sport and a writer who has been hit in the face is visible in every round. What that buys the book is credibility in the places romance usually fakes. The fight scenes are choreographed rather than gestured at, and — the part that genuinely matters — they are readable if you have never watched a card in your life. This is the single most repeated observation in the book’s reception, and it explains its whole reputation: reader after reader opens their review by announcing they do not like MMA, do not like violence, do not like sports romance, and then hands over five stars. Brian’s Book Blog, reviewing the audiobook, called it “a sapphic sports romance I won’t soon forget.” Jude in the Stars, who found the opening third genuinely anxiety-inducing because of a personal association with contact sport, still put it among the year’s favourites and described the pacing exactly: “No downtime, no lull when it would feel right to stop.” The romance is built on a smarter foundation than the premise suggests. Two women who fight for a living are both, professionally, the person nobody can touch — and Disney’s insight is that the erotic charge comes from what it costs each of them to stop being that. It is a book about control, held and surrendered, and it earns its explicit scenes rather than scheduling them. The other structural virtue is discipline: there is no invented late misunderstanding, no third-act separation manufactured to fill chapters. The conflict the book sets up is the conflict it resolves. Where it costs you something is Brooklyn, and this is the most consistent complaint in an overwhelmingly positive reception. In the opening stretch she is arrogant in a way that a meaningful minority of readers found not charming but unpleasant, and because the novel is narrated exclusively from Eden’s head, you get no access to what is driving it until Eden works it out. Readers who trusted the book got a payoff; readers who did not put it down. The single most-liked negative review on Goodreads never gets past it, calling Brooklyn “just insufferable.” The same single-POV choice that keeps Brooklyn a mystery — which several blog reviewers argue is deliberate and effective — is experienced by a steady minority of readers as a hole where her interiority should be. Two smaller reservations. The romantic turn arrives somewhere around the one-third mark and then moves quickly, which some readers experience as whiplash after a slow start. And the religious homophobia in Brooklyn’s family — the engine of the book’s second half — is doing a lot of plot work for how little page space it gets; readers who wanted that thread examined rather than deployed have a case. There is also a small camp who found the dirty talk in the sex scenes overwritten, and they are unusually vocal about it. Against them is a much larger camp who found the same scenes scorching. It is a genuine split rather than a flaw. My honest note: This is the book to hand someone who says they cannot get into rivals-to-lovers or cannot get into sports romance. It converts. Push through Brooklyn’s first eighty pages.

Element	In The Clinch
Central relationship	Eden Bauer & Brooklyn Shaw — reigning UFC featherweight champion and the challenger sent to take her belt
Core tropes	Rivals-to-lovers, forced proximity, closeted love interest, found family, hurt/comfort, mild age gap (27 and 22)
Setting	New York City — a Bronx Taekwondo dojang, professional MMA gyms, and the UFC featherweight division
Heat level	4.3/5 — fully explicit and open-door, character-specific, built around control and its surrender
POV	First person, Eden only — a deliberate choice that keeps Brooklyn unreadable, and the book’s most divisive one
Series	Standalone, 288 pages — HEA, no cliffhanger. Companion novel Tapout (2025) follows Laila
Content notes	Graphic sex; intense sport violence and injury; homophobia and a slur; child abuse; addiction in a minor character; hospitalisation
Awards	2021 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner (LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction); 2022 GCLS Goldie finalist (Contemporary Romance)

How Spicy Is The Clinch?

A 4.3/5. The scenes are unambiguously open-door and detailed, and reviewers reach for the same vocabulary independently — very steamy, scorching, sizzling. What lifts it above a generic explicit rating is that the heat is specific to these two characters rather than transferable: both women are physically dominant by profession, and the intimacy is written around what it means for either of them to yield. Jude in the Stars makes this argument directly, and it is the most persuasive thing written about the book’s eroticism. The caveat is the dialogue. A small but insistent group of readers find the dirty talk overcooked to the point of taking them out of the scene, and they say so bluntly. A much larger group has no such problem. If explicit dialogue is a sensitivity for you, sample before you commit; if it is not, this sits comfortably in the upper tier of sapphic contemporary heat. What it is not is a closed-door book, and it is not a slow trickle either — once the romance turns, the physical side is fully present.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a sports romance where the sport is genuinely on the page, you like rivals who have real professional stakes against each other rather than manufactured hostility, you want an emotionally generous supporting cast and a mentor figure who matters, you read for explicit heat with actual psychology behind it, and you want a romance that resolves without the standard third-act breakup. You may want to skip it if: you need dual POV to connect with a love interest, you have low tolerance for a lead who is abrasive before she is sympathetic, you find graphic sport violence or injury difficult, or you want the closeted-family thread explored in depth rather than used as an engine. Readers sensitive to child abuse and addiction content should check the notes above first. In short: the strongest sapphic MMA romance in print, carried by fight writing almost nobody else in the genre can match — provided you can wait out its second lead.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

Five years on from its January 2021 release, The Clinch occupies a very particular position: it is a book with 1,430-plus Goodreads ratings, a 4.43 average, a Foreword INDIES medal and a Goldie finalist placing — and almost no social media footprint at all. There is no BookTok moment here, no viral edit, no bookstagram wave. It spread through the sapphic review-blog ecosystem and Goodreads word of mouth, one “I don’t even like MMA” review at a time, and it is still the default answer when someone asks a sapphic reading group for a martial arts romance. On Goodreads the distribution is unusually top-heavy: 58% five stars, 30% four, and under 2% at two stars or below. StoryGraph puts it at 4.4 with a 2% did-not-finish rate, and its readers tag it emotional, tense, adventurous and hopeful. Why readers love it (according to the discourse): the fight scenes, first and by a distance — described as vivid, phenomenal, ringside, edge-of-the-seat, and crucially as comprehensible to complete novices. Then the conversion effect: an extraordinary proportion of the top reviews are written by people announcing they do not like sports, do not like violence, or have never watched a UFC card, and rating it five stars regardless. After that, the chemistry, which readers attribute to the specific dynamic of two physically powerful women choosing to be vulnerable with each other. Then the secondary cast — Jin above all, whose mentorship supplies the emotional weight readers say they cried over. Kam’s Place summarised the appeal in two words: “epic fight scenes.” Gaby at Lez Review Books, who reads well over a hundred sapphic titles a year, called it “a complete page-turner” and named it a favourite of the year. What readers argue about and complain about: Brooklyn’s early arrogance, which is the most repeated criticism by some margin and appears even inside five-star reviews as something to be endured. Close behind, the pacing of the romance — the turn lands around a third of the way in and then accelerates faster than the preceding slow burn set up. Third, the single POV: blog reviewers treat Eden-only narration as craft, while Goodreads readers more often experience it as being locked out of Brooklyn. Fourth, the religious-family homophobia thread, which several readers found underdeveloped relative to how much plot rests on it. And fifth, a genuine split on the sex-scene dialogue, where one camp says scorching and the other says cringeworthy. A small number also found the volume of fight description excessive — the exact inverse of the majority view. The audiobook is its own conversation. Keira Grace narrates for Bold Strokes Books, running eight hours thirty-four minutes, released July 2022, and reaction genuinely splits. Brian’s Book Blog rated the audio five stars with no reservations about the performance. Lez Review Books, which rated the book itself at the very top of its scale, dropped the audiobook to four — the objections being Brooklyn’s characterisation, accents that did not match the characters’ stated backgrounds, and Portuguese pronunciation judged inadequate in a book whose second lead is Brazilian-American. Given how much of this novel’s appeal rests on cultural and athletic authenticity, the standard advice applies: listen to the sample first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Clinch a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete standalone with a happily-ever-after and no cliffhanger. A companion novel, Tapout, followed in 2025 and takes up Laila — a secondary character from this book — as its lead, but the two stand alone and The Clinch came first.

Do I need to know anything about MMA to enjoy it?

No, and this is the book’s signature quality. An unusual number of five-star reviews are written by readers who state outright that they have no interest in MMA or in sports romance generally. The technical detail is real but always translated through Eden’s narration.

How spicy is The Clinch?

A 4.3/5. Fully open-door and explicit, with scenes that reviewers describe as very steamy and scorching. The heat is character-specific rather than generic, built around two dominant women surrendering control. The explicit dialogue is the one element readers disagree about.

Does it have a happy ending?

Yes, unambiguously, and it gets there without the manufactured third-act breakup that romance readers brace for. Multiple reviewers single out the absence of a late artificial conflict as a structural strength.

Is the audiobook worth it?

It depends on your ear. Keira Grace narrates the eight-and-a-half-hour Bold Strokes recording, and reviewers split — one five-star audio review with no reservations, another docking a star over Brooklyn’s characterisation and Portuguese pronunciation. Sample it first.

Should I read The Clinch before Tapout?

Readers say yes, consistently. Tapout works on its own, but its narrator Laila is introduced here, and reviewers who read them in order report that the payoff of recognising her depends on having met her first.

Is there an age gap?

A mild one — Eden is twenty-seven and Brooklyn twenty-two. It is a difference in career stage more than in power, and it is not written as an age-gap romance in the trope sense.

If You Loved The Clinch, Read These Next

If the rivalry is what you came for, our complete enemies-to-lovers lesbian romance reading list is the fastest route to more of it. For the same competitive charge in another sport, Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner puts two women on the same football pitch competing for the same position, and Magnetic Rivals runs the rivals dynamic at a similar intensity. If you want the antagonism sharper and darker, Tryst Six Venom by Penelope Douglas takes sports rivalry somewhere far more hostile. For something lighter after all that violence, She Drives Me Crazy and Smash or Pass keep the competitive setup and drop the stakes. Or browse the full Book Reviews collection.

Why It Made Our Lists

The Clinch is featured on our Enemies-to-Lovers Lesbian Romance guide.

The Bottom Line

The Clinch is the best sapphic sports romance in print for one specific reason: the sport is written by someone who does it, and it shows on every page. The fight scenes are thrilling and legible, the central dynamic has real psychological architecture underneath the trash talk, the supporting cast carries genuine emotional weight, and the book resolves without the cheap late conflict the genre defaults to. It asks you to tolerate a difficult second lead for a while and to accept being locked in one head throughout, and a fair number of readers would have preferred more room for the closeted-family thread. Those are real costs. They are also the reason it works, and five years and a 4.43 average later, it remains the book sapphic readers hand over when someone asks for a martial arts romance. Check The Clinch on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Clinch ranks as a top-tier sapphic sports romance and one of the strongest titles in the Bold Strokes contemporary catalogue — an award-winning, technically credible fight novel that also functions as a properly satisfying romance.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★★ 4.5/5

• ✓ 4.43 average across roughly 1,430 Goodreads ratings
• ✓ 2021 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner, LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction
• ✓ 2022 GCLS Goldie finalist, Contemporary Romance
• ✓ Only a 2% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph

Romance ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

• ✓ Rivalry with genuine professional stakes on both sides
• ✓ Chemistry built on control and its surrender
• ✓ No manufactured third-act breakup
• ✓ The turn arrives late, then moves fast

Characters ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

• ✓ Eden is a fully realised, disciplined, quietly damaged lead
• ✓ Jin, Laila and Mateo give the book real weight
• ✓ Brooklyn’s early arrogance loses some readers entirely
• ✓ Single POV leaves Brooklyn’s interiority closed

Writing ★★★★★ 4.6/5

• ✓ Fight choreography almost nobody in the genre can match
• ✓ Written by an instructor and competitor, not a researcher
• ✓ Legible to readers who have never watched a fight
• ✓ A minority found the fight detail excessive

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

• ✓ Mentorship and chosen family land hard
• ✓ Readers report crying — usually not at the romance
• ✓ Youth outreach thread gives the fights consequence
• ✓ The homophobia subplot is underexplored

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

• ✓ Fully explicit, open door, no fade to black
• ✓ Reviewers independently reach for “scorching”
• ✓ Character-specific rather than interchangeable
• ✓ Explicit dialogue divides readers sharply

Ending ★★★★★ 4.5/5

• ✓ Unambiguous HEA, no cliffhanger
• ✓ Resolves the conflict it actually set up
• ✓ No late artificial separation
• ✓ Companion novel available if you want more

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.2/5

• ✓ Fight sequences reward a second pass
• ✓ Brooklyn reads completely differently once you know
• ✓ Strong comfort-read pull despite the violence
• ✓ Heavy content notes limit casual re-reading

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