Icebreaker
Icebreaker
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Hannah Grace on Icebreaker
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A pandemic hobby that got out of handGrace did not set out to become a novelist. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she had spent years as an avid reader but kept herself firmly on the other side of the page. When she finally crossed it, the push came from one person.
A writer friend encouraged me to give it a go and here we are.
The casual dismissal in her public storytelling about that moment is deliberate. She has told the origin story often enough to have a line for it, but underneath the joke she has also described what actually kept her at the desk once she sat down at it.
I always joke that I just girlbossed too close to the sun, but the reality is my pandemic hobby went a little further than a hobby. I’ve always loved reading and spent a lot of time in the library as a kid, but I was firmly in the ‘I could never write a book’ camp.
Writing Icebreaker was not only an exercise in craft. It was also, for Grace, a private coping mechanism, one she has named directly when explaining what made the work sustainable during lockdown.
I’ve always struggled with anxiety and I found writing helped me escape to someone else’s life for a little while.
Icebreaker was self-published in August 2022. Atria Books acquired it, and what had been a lockdown project became Grace’s full-time career.
How she wrote it
An English author inventing American college lifeGrace is English and based in Manchester, but Icebreaker is set in a fictional American university. Bridging that gap required no formal methodology, and she has been candid about how improvised her preparation actually was.
I don’t really have a ‘research’ process but I should probably get one! I’ve spent my entire life watching American TV and reading American books which I think really influences my creative process. Most of my friends are also American so I can always check things with them. Now writing is my full-time job, I try to travel to America as often as I can.
The longer she writes American settings, the less confident she is that she can hear the difference between her two vocabularies. In a 2025 podcast interview, she described the linguistic drift that has crept into her daily speech since Icebreaker came out.
I actually think I’m getting worse... I can’t tell what’s American anymore. What is something that is like been created in my brain and what’s English? [paraphrased from audio]
On character, Grace works without a blueprint. She described her general method in the same interview, not as plotting from the outside in but as listening for people who arrive in her head already assembled.
I tend to have characters come to me fully formed. Some more difficult, like I kind of have to prod around my head a bit more... These people appear to me and then I’m like, okay, where do they fit in this puzzle? [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
What readers kept writing to tell herGrace’s stated goal for every book she writes is to be approachable rather than weighty. By the time Icebreaker found its audience, she had already articulated why she thought that goal was worth defending.
I like the escapism that comes with contemporary romance. I’m a big believer that not every book needs to have a profound impact on your outlook on life. Reading to laugh or cry or just be incredibly jealous of the main character can be just as important to your overall well-being. That’s why I call my books fluffy comfort books, because I’m trying to create something that isn’t intimidating.
Within that deliberately light frame, Grace made specific choices about who Anastasia would be as a person. When asked what she hoped readers would take from the protagonist, Grace pointed to two concrete behaviors rather than to personality traits.
I think with Anastasia she’s just someone who wants to do well and that’s a feeling a lot of people can relate to. She communicates her feelings and she works on getting better by going to therapy, and I think that’s something a lot of people can aspire toward if they’re not quite there yet.
The plot thread that generated the most reader messages was not the romance. It was the subplot in which Anastasia’s figure-skating partner manipulates her relationship with food and her body. Grace did not anticipate the volume of personal responses that thread would draw.
On a more serious note, the book discusses Anastasia’s journey with her struggles around food and weight gain. I’ve had a lot of messages from people who relate to this particular theme of the book and have shared their own journey and thanked me for including it.
Grace also described being caught off guard by reader attachment to Henry, Nate’s roommate, whose demand for his own book scaled far beyond what she had expected from a secondary character. He eventually became the centre of Daydream, the third book in the Maple Hills series.