A Sharp Endless Need – Mac Crane
A queer basketball novel about two teammates falling for each other while chasing Division I dreams in the early 2000s? Could there have been a more timely novel to match the current WNBA fervor? Add in a dedication to every athlete who ever had a crush on a teammate and Mac Crane had already earned a tremendous amount of goodwill before I even reached the first chapter.
The novel opens with Mack Morris and their/her father heading to a Philadelphia 76ers game during the Allen Iverson era, immediately grounding the story in the early 2000s. Mack’s father is charismatic and deeply flawed: a gambling addict proudly bragging about Mack’s basketball future while secretly handing them a beer. A few weeks later, he’s dead, and Mack learned the family was drowning in debt badly enough that basketball suddenly felt less like a passion and more like the only available escape route.
At the wake, Mack meets Liv Cooper, the only player around capable of matching her on the court. Their chemistry as teammates quickly spills into something romantic, and for a while the novel genuinely hummed with possibility. Crane understands the intensity of queer teenage fixation, especially when it was tied to ambition and competition.
In these sections, there were flashes of a much sharper novel here about internalized homophobia, familial expectations, the pressure of hiding yourself for survival and the complicated reality of loving someone who threatens your future as much as they sustain your present.
But somewhere around the halfway point, the book completely lost me.
Instead of digging deeper into those tensions, the novel settled into repetitive teen self-destruction tropes: endless drinking, smoking and getting high. On paper, I understood what Crane was aiming for – grief and self-destruction are messy and closeted teenagers make bad decisions – but the characterization never felt convincing because it constantly clashed with the reality of who these characters supposedly were.
You cannot convince me that two elite basketball players with legitimate Division I potential would have been such apathetic burnouts. The book kept insisting they were ambitious while showing the opposite at nearly every turn. If this story had been set in the 1980s, maybe I could have bought the level of fatalism and lack of direction. However, by the mid-2000s women’s basketball had visible professional pathways and serious college recruitment pipelines. These characters would have understood exactly what was at stake. Instead, they behaved like they barely cared.
That disconnect ultimately killed the novel for me. The basketball scenes themselves were excellent — easily the strongest writing in the book — but everything else was strangely generic. The adults were mostly caricatures, the conflicts repeated themselves and the relationship between Mack and Liv eventually devolved into the kind of mopey, self-inflicted misery that made it difficult to root for either of them.
At 58%, I realized I no longer cared what happened, which was frustrating because I genuinely thought there was a better novel trapped inside this one. It also was not helped by Dani Martineck’s audiobook narration, which felt oddly flat throughout. The performance stayed monotone for long stretches, then swung into exaggerated emotional delivery that never landed naturally for me.
The opening chapters suggest Crane is capable of something far more nuanced and honest than what this novel ultimately became. Hopefully their next novel delivers on that promise.
Rating (story): 2/5 stars
Rating (narration): 2/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: May 2 – May 5, 2026
Multi-tasking: Good to go. I'd recommend spending your time elsewhere entirely.
