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Verdict: A warm, big-hearted roller derby romance with a trans heroine who gets to be the star of her own story and some of the best female friendships in the genre, held back by a romance and a secret-relationship conflict that most reviewers found too thin to carry the weight.
Best for: Readers who want a sapphic sports romance about a trans woman rebuilding her life, a sweet butch coach and a team that becomes family, and who can forgive a love story less developed than the friendships around it.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door; romance.io has no steam band, so this is derived from trade and reader reports)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.71 Goodreads average across 838 ratings, with the same complaint about an underpowered romance running through most of the reviews)
Tropes: Roller derby, coach and player, secret relationship, trans heroine, butch love interest, fresh start after divorce, meet-cute over a plumbing disaster, found family on a sports team, first-person single POV, series companion novel.
Roller Girl by Vanessa North is the third book in the Lake Lovelace series, first published by Riptide Publishing in July 2016 and reissued by the author on Kindle in 2018, a category-length contemporary lesbian romance set in a lakeside town known for its wakeboarding competitions — and the collision at its centre is Tina Durham, a recently divorced trans woman and former pro wakeboarder who has never had to run her own life, and Joe Delario, the butch plumber who fixes her flooded kitchen and then recruits her to the roller derby team she coaches.
It holds a 3.71 average across 838 Goodreads ratings, a near-identical 3.72 across 412 StoryGraph reviews, and a 4.3 from 123 Amazon ratings. It drew unusual trade attention for a 2016 sapphic romance: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Dear Author, All About Romance, three separate Lesbrary reviewers and a trans-focused review blog all covered it. Their grades cluster tightly between B-minus and B-plus, and almost every one of them says the same two things. Both halves of that verdict are worth understanding before you start.
What Is Roller Girl About?
Roller Girl is a sapphic butch lead sports romance, but readers keep describing it as something slightly different: a book about roller derby and the women who play it, with a love story running through the middle. StoryGraph readers tag it emotional (66%) and lighthearted (64%), and 63% call it character-driven. The engine is Tina’s recovery — from a marriage, a finished sporting career and years of letting someone else run her life.
Tina narrates the whole book in first-person present tense. She is a trans woman who has already transitioned, a personal trainer whose business is struggling, and someone who has never really had close female friends. Joe is sweet, funny, competent with a wrench, and determined that nobody on her team finds out she is sleeping with one of her skaters. The single POV gives Tina a full interior and leaves Joe seen only from outside, which is where most readers’ reservations start.
What Makes This Sapphic Sports Romance Work
- The female friendships: The single most praised element across Goodreads and the trade reviews. K.J. Charles called them brilliant in her Goodreads review, and more than one reader names Tina’s friendship with teammate Lauren as a highlight.
- A trans heroine at the centre of her own story: Reviewers value that Tina’s arc is about rebuilding her life, not about coming out or being accepted. The Good, the Bad and the Unread praised a trans character who “got to be the awesome one.”
- The derby itself: Even readers who say they avoid sports romance enjoyed it, and one Lesbrary reviewer called it a derby book first and a romance second, meaning it as praise.
- Body positivity: All About Romance and several readers single out the book’s body positivity, and Tina rediscovering what her body can do is part of the pleasure.
- Kindness as the default: Readers call it a comfort read, and conflicts are handled by adults talking, which Smart Bitches summed up as problems solved with compassion and ordinary adulting.
Book Synopsis
Tina Durham’s wakeboarding career is behind her, and so is her marriage. Her ex-wife used to handle the bills, the repairs and the grown-up logistics, and Tina is discovering how much she never learned to do. Her personal-training clients are drifting away, her closest friends are wrapped up in new relationships, and one morning the washing machine floods the kitchen.
The plumber who answers the call is Joanne Delario, known to everyone as Joe Mama. She fixes the leak, makes Tina laugh, and asks her out — or at least, that is what it looks like. Joe actually wants something else as well. She coaches a local roller derby team, and she thinks a former pro athlete belongs on skates.
Derby turns out to be exactly what Tina needed: a reason to train hard again and a locker room full of loud, funny, protective women who take her in. The attraction between her and Joe keeps building through practices, and eventually neither of them resists it. There is one condition. Joe has watched a relationship inside a team wreck a squad before, and she wants what they have kept quiet. The secrecy is thrilling at first, then starts to feel like the life Tina just left — one where someone else decides how much space she takes up. The question is whether she can be happy with half of Joe, and whether she even wants to depend on anyone again.
My Review
Tina is the reason this book has lasted, and she is genuinely rare. Her story is not about transitioning or being accepted. It is about an athlete who has lost her sport and her marriage learning to take care of herself, find friends and fall for someone. Readers across the rating range praise how fully drawn she is.
The second strength is the team. North writes women who tease, fight and show up for each other, and that community does more emotional work than anything else in the book. More than one reviewer says the book made them tear up, and it is the friendships rather than the romance that do it; one reader singles out a short arc for Lauren’s husband as the scene that left her weeping.
Where it struggles is the love story, and this is not a minority view — it is the most repeated criticism in the reviews, made by readers at two, three and four stars alike. Smart Bitches did not believe in the couple, Trans Book Reviews called it flat, and Goodreads readers keep using the words quick, rushed and underdeveloped. Joe is part of the reason: seen only through Tina’s eyes, she never becomes vivid. The central conflict is the secrecy, and readers find the reasoning thin; K.J. Charles notes that when the truth comes out it isn’t a big deal, which undercuts the breakup that comes before it. Dear Author adds that the resolution arrives too fast.
One expectation to reset: this is a 174-page category romance, and it is gentler than the word “derby” suggests. Nobody on the team is transphobic, the book’s handling of trans issues is openly optimistic, and one reader called it a shiny little fairy tale. If you came for angst and hard-won stakes, calibrate. If you came for a kind, sexy, body-positive book where a trans woman gets her happy ending, you are in the right place.
My honest note: A lovely heroine and a great team wrapped around a romance that never quite catches up with them. If you need the couple to be the most compelling thing on the page, you will be disappointed. If Tina finding her people is enough, it is a genuinely good afternoon.
| Element | In Roller Girl |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Tina Durham & Joe Delario — divorced trans ex-wakeboarder and butch plumber-coach, player/coach secret relationship |
| Core tropes | Roller derby, coach and player, secret relationship, fresh start after divorce, team as found family, butch love interest |
| Setting | Lake Lovelace — a lakeside wakeboarding town and its local roller derby league |
| Heat level | 4/5 — explicit open door, dirty talk |
| Series | Lake Lovelace book 3 — standalone couple, together at the end, no cliffhanger |
| Content notes | Explicit sex, a scene of misgendering by a stranger, discussion of transphobia, divorce, depression, contact-sport physicality |
How Spicy Is Roller Girl?
A 4/5, with a note on where that number comes from. I could not find a romance.io entry for this book, so the figure is derived from the trade reviews and the reader record. Goodreads readers call the sex scenes hot and sizzling, one praises “super-solid dirty talk,” and a Lesbrary reviewer says the number and explicitness of the scenes surprised her. Another Lesbrary reviewer singles out how respectfully Tina’s body is written. The outliers sit lower: All About Romance rated the sensuality “warm,” and one reader’s scale put it at a few pages of sex in a mostly-story book.
The element worth knowing in advance is that the book writes explicit sex scenes with a trans heroine, and reviewers split on them — most who discuss it praise it as respectful and unfetishising, while the Trans Book Reviews team felt it read like generic sex scenes written without enough research. No reviewer flags anything else. For sapphic sports and butch romance in the same heat band, Cleat Cute and Touch the Sky sit at the same level.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want a trans heroine whose story is about joy and growth rather than trauma, you enjoy sports romance built around a team of women who become family, you like a soft, handy butch love interest, and explicit heat in a short, fast read appeals.
You may want to skip it if: you need the romance to be the strongest thread in the book, secret-relationship conflicts frustrate you when the reasons feel thin, you want both leads equally developed, or you prefer angst and high stakes over optimism.
In short: a generous, feel-good book about a trans woman finding her people, with a love story that plays second string.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
This is a 2016 book whose trade moment is long past. Its Riptide release put it in front of more reviewers than most sapphic romances of that year: Smart Bitches and Dear Author both graded it B-minus, All About Romance gave it a B, The Good, the Bad and the Unread a B-plus, and Trans Book Reviews a 6/10. Since then it has moved slowly. The author reissued the Kindle edition in May 2018, and an unabridged audiobook narrated by Ashley Lauren Rogers followed in May 2021 from Bryant Street Publishing, running 4 hours 12 minutes. One Goodreads listener flagged editing slips in the audio, including repeated lines. On Goodreads, 58% of ratings are four or five stars and 32% are three; StoryGraph shows a 2% did-not-finish rate and 58% of readers calling it fast-paced.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The friendships, first and most consistently — “women supporting women” is the recurring idea, and K.J. Charles called the book a delight on that front alone. Then Tina, praised as strong, relatable and fully human, with 79% of StoryGraph reviewers calling the characters lovable. The trans representation gets real praise, notably from romance author Penny Aimes, who credits North with putting the camera squarely behind Tina’s eyes.
What readers argue about and complain about: The romance, above everything. Readers from two stars to four say it moves too fast and lacks tension. Second, and closely tied: the conflict. Joe’s insistence on secrecy, rooted in a past team breakup, strikes several reviewers as contrived for an amateur league, and the breakup that follows feels unearned when going public turns out to be easy. Third: Joe herself, sweet but thinly drawn. Then the genuine split — the trans representation. Many readers praise it; others, including K.J. Charles and Penny Aimes while still enjoying the book, note moments where Tina becomes a mouthpiece for trans issues, or where the representation takes on an after-school-special quality. The sharpest version comes from Trans Book Reviews, whose reviewer felt that “cisgender voices massively overshadow the trans character about her own identity.” A Lesbrary reviewer also notes that it is not own-voices representation. Both readings are worth knowing.
The standalone question worth asking first: Roller Girl stands alone. The author herself says on Goodreads that you do not need the earlier books, and it runs alongside book two in the series timeline. Tina and Joe end together, with the relationship out in the open and no cliffhanger; one reader describes it as happy-for-now rather than a full HEA. Tina appears as a secondary character in the first two books, Double Up (3.66 on Goodreads) and Rough Road (3.71), which follow other couples, so readers who fell for her there get her full story here. Roller Girl is the last of the three Lake Lovelace novels.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Joe in Roller Girl butch?
Yes. Joe is a plumber and roller derby coach, and reviewers describe her as butch — the Lesbrary calls her a swoonworthy butch and another reader a cute soft butch. Tina, the narrator, is a trans woman.
How spicy is Roller Girl?
A 4/5 by our estimate. romance.io has no steam band for it, but multiple readers describe explicit, hot scenes with dirty talk, though All About Romance rated it only “warm.”
Does Roller Girl have a happy ending?
Yes. After a temporary breakup over the secrecy, Tina and Joe end together and go public with the team, with no cliffhanger. One reader calls it happy-for-now rather than a sealed HEA.
Do I need to read the other Lake Lovelace books first?
No. The author says it is a standalone, and characters from books one and two only make appearances. Tina is a secondary character in those books, so series readers get extra context but newcomers are not lost.
Is there a Roller Girl audiobook?
Yes. It is narrated by Ashley Lauren Rogers and runs 4 hours 12 minutes, released in 2021 by Bryant Street Publishing; one listener flagged editing slips in the production.
Is this the Roller Girl graphic novel?
No. This is Vanessa North’s 2016 adult sapphic romance. The middle-grade graphic novel of the same name by Victoria Jamieson is a different book entirely.
If You Loved Roller Girl, Read These Next
For another sapphic sports romance at the same heat level with a team at its heart, Cleat Cute brings teammates-to-lovers chemistry, a low-angst comfort-read tone and a similar sense of a team as family. If the trans storyline mattered most to you, Stick Around is a hockey romance whose most-praised subplot follows a trans youth player fighting to keep playing. And if Joe’s soft, handy butch energy was the draw, Touch the Sky gives you a warm small-town romance with a butch farrier and a supporting cast readers adore.
For more in this register, browse our butch lesbian romance guide or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Roller Girl sets out to give a trans woman an ordinary, joyful sports romance, and much of it lands. Tina is a warm, fully realised heroine, the derby team is one of the best portraits of female friendship in the genre, and the heat is confident and kind. It is also a romance whose love interest stays sketchy, whose secret-relationship conflict feels thin, and whose resolution arrives faster than it earns. If you want a short, generous book about a trans woman finding her strength and her people, it is worth the time. Check Roller Girl on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Roller Girl ranks as a warm, explicit, friendship-driven sapphic sports romance — carried by Tina and her derby team, held back by an underdeveloped couple and a flimsy central conflict, and best approached for the heroine and the found family rather than a knockout love story.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ 3.71 average across 838 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ 3.72 across 412 StoryGraph reviews
- ✓ B-minus to B-plus across four trade reviews
- ✓ Thin romance flagged in most trade reviews
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Dear Author found the pair sweet and hot
- ✓ Couple talks problems through, readers note
- ✓ Secret coach-player tension drives the middle
- ✓ Rushed, low-tension love story per most reviewers
Characters ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Tina praised across the rating range
- ✓ 80% of StoryGraph readers cite strong development
- ✓ Team and Lauren’s family steal scenes
- ✓ Joe sweet but never vivid
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Fast-paced per 58% of StoryGraph readers
- ✓ Derby scenes engage non-sports readers
- ✓ Present-tense first person divides readers
- ✓ Occasional telling and explaining trans issues
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ 66% of StoryGraph readers tag it emotional
- ✓ Friendships move readers to tears
- ✓ Tina’s self-reliance arc lands
- ✓ Low stakes; some call it a fairy tale
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Explicit scenes surprised a Lesbrary reviewer
- ✓ Dirty talk and a parking-lot make-out praised
- ✓ Written respectfully, per most reviewers
- ✓ No romance.io band; AAR rated it warm
Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ Together and public, no cliffhanger
- ✓ Standalone couple, final series book
- ✓ Tina’s independence arc completes
- ✓ Resolution called quick and unearned
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Comfort-read status for several readers
- ✓ 4-hour 12-minute audiobook for a second pass
- ✓ Team scenes reward a return
- ✓ Audio editing slips flagged by a listener
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