Finish Lines
Sarah Broyles
First Second
Published June 16, 2026
Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads
About Finish Lines
Miranda needs something to write about in her college application essays. But what?
Miranda has a plan: ace her junior year, get into an Ivy League school, and skip anything that doesn’t look good on a college application. But the pressure is getting to her, and now her parents have cut her off from every club, competition, and committee she’s a part of.
Desperate to get back on track, Miranda sets her sights on the Texas Water Safari—a 260-mile canoe race her mom was set to do with her granddad. With her mom sidelined by an injury, Miranda joins her grandfather. It’s grueling, messy, and scorching hot.
Can a perfectionist survive the wild long enough to find out who she is outside of a college checklist?
My Review
I love seeing sports books celebrating activities beyond the traditionally represented ones, so I was especially excited to stumble upon this book about competitive canoeing. To describe this simply as a sports book, though, doesn’t leave room for some of the other wonderful components that Broyles has stitched together here.
At first, Miranda sees the canoe race with her grandfather as a way to skirt her parents’ new rule requiring her to take it easy and reduce her commitments. The race will make a great college essay topic, she reasons. Plus, it’ll be amazing if she and her grandfather win the race this year.
As Miranda and her grandfather prep for the race, Miranda realizes that the trek will be more challenging than she predicted. She’s also stunned to learn that her grandfather doesn’t approach the race with any intention of winning. Finishing the race, he reasons, is the real victory.
This attitude and some of the rules on the river challenge Miranda’s desire to push herself beyond what’s reasonable (and sometimes safe). She has to decide how to balance the elements of the race, her relationships with her family, and her school work.
I thought the parallel stories of Miranda’s overcommitment and her mom’s addiction recovery and chronic illness were really nicely done. We don’t think of socially acceptable forms of addiction as problematic, but they can be just as harmful to ourselves and our relationships with others.
This book made me want to get out on the river and spend time in nature. It also made me appreciate intergenerational relationships, especially those within families.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 14 up.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used very infrequently.
Romance/Sexual Content
None.
Spiritual Content
None.
Violent Content
Situations of peril on the river.
Drug Content
Miranda’s parents are recovered addicts. The story peripherally follows her mom’s struggle with chronic pain as an addict in recovery and frames Miranda’s tendency to overcommit as a kind of addiction.
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