Book Title: The Paddock Club
Author: Madge Maril
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publishing Date: July 2026
Most Formula 1 romances ask readers to fall in love with the glamour of the paddock.
The Paddock Club certainly understands that allure: the speed, the spectacle, the impossible proximity to a sport that has inspired generations of fans. But Madge Maril’s sophomore novel refuses to romanticise that world uncritically. Instead, it asks a more interesting question: what does it cost to exist inside a sport built on extraordinary privilege, and what happens when the people who love that sport aren’t the ones it was designed for?
That tension sits at the heart of — and is embodied with gusto by — Cat Cromwell.
I’m not a good person. What I am, though, is a good woman…Saying sorry when you’re not sorry, styling your hair within an inch of its life, choosing silence so you can be invisible, so you can do whatever you want.
Cat Cromwell is a compelling protagonist, and she isn’t even real
When we first meet Cat, she already makes a living performing versions of herself. Her job involves pretending to date wealthy, often unpleasant men on behalf of women they’ve wronged, a deliciously inventive premise that immediately establishes performance as both livelihood and survival mechanism.
It’s a wonderfully playful setup, but Maril quickly reveals that beneath the humour lies something much heavier. Cat moves through life surrounded by carefully maintained lies, so much so that they’ve begun to shape the way she understands herself.
What makes Cat such a compelling protagonist is that she isn’t defined by one singular White Rabbit event. Contemporary romance often gravitates towards a single life-altering moment that explains everything about a character’s emotional landscape. Maril resists that temptation and delivers on it with much panache. Cat, instead, becomes the cumulative result of countless smaller moments: financial precarity, watching someone she loves move through the dungeon that is the American healthcare system, picking up pieces of her life in the aftermath of the medical horrors, repeatedly choosing self-sacrifice over self-preservation, quietly reshaping herself to fit whatever circumstances demanded of her.
She’s not broken by one catastrophe. She’s worn down by accumulation. That choice makes Cat feel startlingly real.
That’s what a relationship would be for me: a stopping point. A period after so many gorgeous sentences.
Class(consciousness) is in session
The novel’s commentary on class is equally nuanced. Rather than treating wealth simply as money, The Paddock Club understands it as access: access to opportunities, mistakes, second chances and the ability to solve one problem before it creates three more. Cat’s life demonstrates the opposite reality. Without those resources, setbacks rarely remain isolated. They multiply, each one quietly threatening the fragile architecture of ambitions, plans and dreams she’d painstakingly built for herself.
You know those dog breeds that start chewing coffee table legs if they’re left indoors for too long? Labradoodles, or whatever? That’s the 1 percent.
It’s also refreshing to see that class consciousness isn’t reserved solely for the heroine. Faust carries his own awareness of the world he’s inherited and the systems that sustain it. The resulting romance doesn’t ask readers to ignore inequality in favour of chemistry. Instead, it acknowledges those imbalances while allowing intimacy to develop honestly alongside them.
That honesty extends to Maril’s treatment of Formula 1 itself.
Like Slipstream before it, The Paddock Club is clearly written by someone who loves motorsport deeply enough to critique it. The novel understands that fandom doesn’t require blind devotion. If anything, genuine love for a sport demands a willingness to examine the structures that underpin it: the elitism, the exclusivity, the commercial ecosystem and the industries orbiting the racing itself.
It’s the literal classic deal with the Devil. Faust signed his life away on the dotted line for temporary satisfaction. A bad idea. That now I’m starting to understand. Sometimes, we ignore the signs and ask the Devil himself if we can borrow his pen.
Cat’s place within Formula 1’s fashion and branding world reinforces that broader perspective. Rather than focusing solely on what happens on the track, Maril pays equal attention to the secondary and tertiary ecosystems that make the sport what it is. The paddock becomes more than a glamorous backdrop; it becomes a living environment where ambition, branding, labour and privilege constantly intersect.
Perhaps my favourite thread running through the novel is watching Cat reconcile with something she loved long before she fully understood it. Her childlike awe at entering the paddock never entirely disappears, even as she becomes increasingly aware of the inequalities embedded within it. It’s a beautiful reflection of a much larger experience: recognising that the things we loved growing up were never perfect, yet finding ways to love them more honestly because of that knowledge rather than despite it.
Faust meets my bubbly ingenue act with the flirtatiousness of a brick wall.
Maril’s prose style is particularly well-suited to this kind of story.
Readers familiar with Slipstream will recognise her granular approach to interiority. Rather than summarising emotions, she lets them unfold in real time through Cat’s stream of consciousness. The effect is remarkably immersive. Instead of observing Cat from a distance, readers find themselves inhabiting her emotional landscape, feeling each hesitation, each compromise and each flicker of hope alongside her.
It’s writing that makes you feel as though you’ve crawled beneath the character’s skin.
At the same time, Maril never loses sight of the romance. The chemistry between Cat and Faust is palpable from their earliest interactions, sustained by piercing observation, banter over a game of chess, and an almost unbearable tension that lingers beneath every conversation. Their dynamic remains deeply enthralling even as the novel tackles considerably weightier themes, and because both characters arrive with fully lived-in histories, their relationship feels earned rather than idealised. It’s all the finer elements of a literary romance.
He was born with everything, so of course he has everything. That isn’t greatness. It just is the fucking bar on the floor. Enjoy it, if you stoop that low.
If I had one wish, it would simply be for more of Cat’s wonderfully theatrical alter ego. Watching her outwit terrible men through carefully constructed performances is so much fun as a concept that I found myself wanting even more of those moments before the story naturally expanded into its larger emotional concerns. But perhaps that’s also a testament to how fully realised Cat becomes.
She’s funny, resentful, vulnerable, resilient, contradictory and endlessly perceptive, a heroine who refuses to flatten herself into a single defining characteristic.
By the time the novel reaches its conclusion, The Paddock Club has become about far more than Formula 1 or even romance. It’s a story about identity, class, survival, reinvention and learning that loving something deeply doesn’t require pretending it’s flawless. If anything, Madge Maril argues the opposite.
The deepest love is the kind that can look directly at the imperfections and choose to stay anyway.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance review copy (ARC). All opinions expressed are my own.