Icebreaker did something specific: it took the college sports romance — a format that had been running quietly for a decade — and made it the biggest thing on BookTok. If you have finished it and Anastasia and Nate’s friend group has left a hole, the good news is that the subgenre is deep. The useful question is which part of the book you actually want more of, because the answers point in different directions.
What you’re actually looking for
Break Icebreaker into its parts and it is: a grumpy-sunshine pairing, a forced-proximity setup, a warm and heavily-featured friend group, high heat, and hockey. Almost no other book gives you all five at once, so the sensible approach is to pick the one or two that mattered most to you.
If it was the friend group, stay in Maple Hills or move to a series with the same ensemble structure. If it was the grumpy-sunshine dynamic, that is a trope you can chase directly. If it was the hockey specifically, there is a whole shelf of it — see our hockey romance guide for the wider field. And if it was mostly the heat level, the sport is incidental and you should widen out to spicy contemporary.
Seven books to read after Icebreaker
Ordered roughly from closest match to furthest, so you can stop reading the list wherever the description stops sounding like what you want.
Wildfire: A Novel — Hannah Grace
The literal next step. Russ and Aurora meet at a summer camp where Russ is working off a debt and Aurora is running from a broken engagement, and the whole thing plays out away from the rink — same voice, same heat level, less hockey. Read it second and you get the Maple Hills friend group again, which is half of why people finish Icebreaker in a weekend.
The Deal — Elle Kennedy
The book most of the current college-hockey boom descends from. Hannah needs leverage, Garrett needs a passing grade, and the arrangement does what arrangements do. It is a decade older than Icebreaker and reads slightly less polished, but the banter is sharper and there are four more books behind it with the same friend group.
Behind the Net — Stephanie Archer
If the grumpy-sunshine dynamic was the part you were there for, this is the closest match on the list. Jamie is the league’s most closed-off goalie; Pippa is a musician who ends up living in his apartment. Archer writes the grumpy half with more interiority than most, so the thaw is gradual rather than switch-flipped.
Mile High — Liz Tomforde
The pro-league version. Stevie is the first woman hired as the team’s chef; Zanders is the enforcer with a reputation he has stopped correcting. It is a slower burn than Icebreaker and the emotional register is heavier, but the friend-group structure is the same and the series has kept its quality across four books.
Pucking Around — Emily Rath
A step sideways rather than a step down the same road. Rachel is a doctoral student doing a rotation with an NHL team and the book is why-choose, meaning she ends up with more than one of them rather than choosing. Enormously popular with the same readership. If that premise is not for you, skip it — but it is the single most-recommended follow-on in the hockey-romance community.
Heated Rivalry — Rachel Reid
The best-written book on this list, and the one most likely to surprise you. Two rival stars — one Russian, one Canadian — spend years in a relationship neither can acknowledge. Reid does the thing sports romance usually skips: the cost of the secrecy is real and the hockey is accurate. Now adapted for television, which tells you something.
The Year We Fell Down — Sarina Bowen
The gentle one. Corey arrives at college using a wheelchair after an injury ends her hockey career, and her neighbour is a hockey player with a girlfriend at home. Lower heat than the rest of this list and considerably more tender. Worth knowing about because it is the book people recommend when someone says they want the sport without the spice.
A note on reading order
Three of these are first-in-series and two are not. Wildfire is Maple Hills #2 and follows Icebreaker directly, so it is the only one that requires you to have read anything. Heated Rivalry is Game Changers #2 but works completely as a standalone — most people start there and go back, and the series is better for it.
The rest open their own series. The Deal, Behind the Net, Mile High and Pucking Around each begin a four-to-six book run with a rotating cast, which is the structure that makes this subgenre so easy to binge: you keep the friend group and swap the couple.
If none of these land
The honest answer is that Icebreaker’s particular combination of low-stakes comfort and high heat is rarer than its popularity suggests, and a lot of what gets recommended alongside it is darker or angstier than people expect. If the first two chapters of one of these feels wrong, it probably is — drop it.
Two other directions worth trying: enemies-to-lovers contemporary, which shares the banter density, or filtering the catalogue directly by trope and heat level to build your own list.