tl;dr: great story mired in awkward prose – less picky readers will love this
The story:
I hadn’t realized that hockey player romances were such a widespread phenomenon, but in the past few weeks, I’ve read 3 of them, all by different authors, and to varying degrees of enjoyment. I tend to compare most sports romance to Susan Elizabeth Phillips and her wonderful Chicago Stars series, which centers on a pro-football team and all the varying people involved in it. The thing that is particularly striking with that series is that the books don’t really need to be read in publication order. The stories stand on their own.
I think maybe that was the intention with this book too, but there were so many things I felt may have been cleared up in the previous books (which I did not read). This book uses a real hockey team (The Colorado Avalanche) but fails to ever mention which position Ben plays. (I think he might be captain, according to a brief mention of a C on his jersey. That means captain, right?) And much of the personality of the hero isn’t clearly established, leaving me to wonder if maybe his “playboy” persona is more clearly established in a previous book. He does get random calls from women on his phone a lot, but we don’t get a lot of evidence that he’s the womanizer the book claims that he is. (Particularly since they make a point to say he supports 3 children’s charities? Whaaaa…?)