Tag: hockey romance

Quick Reviews No. 4

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The Confessions by Tiffany Reisz

This is a must read for all Original Sinners fans, particularly if you’ve completely all 8 books in the main series. It’s pretty much an ending to it all, although the first half takes place somewhere around the timeline of The Saint.

Part one is Soren’s confession to Father Ballard, immediately when he meets Eleanor the first time and realizes the temptation before him. Part two is Nora’s confession years later, when she finds a photograph in Soren’s Bible that brings up all kinds of conflicting feelings. And then there’s a fun interview with the author at the end.

Readers Advisory: I mean, obviously if you haven’t read the rest of the Original Sinners series you should start from there with The Siren.

The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz

I love a good crazy-pants plot, and this one was totally bananas. But in the best way. Combine VC Andrews with a bourbon distillery and this is what you get. It’s Southern Gothic, and has lots going on. CW for incest and attempted rape. But trust me, if you can handle those, this book is totally a ride you should take, because it wraps up completely wonderfully in the end.

Readers Advisory: Criminal podcast did an episode on Pappy Van Winkle recently and it is paired perfectly with this book.

Rookie Move by Sarina Bowen

I love hockey romance, and I knew I would love this series. I’d actually heard a lot about book two, and decided to start from the first one, just because I was that confident that I’d love it, and usually I find that reading in published order makes for a better reading experience. I did, in fact, very much enjoy this book!

The heroine is the publicist for the Brooklyn Bruisers, a fictional hockey team set in–you guessed it!–Brooklyn, NY. The hero is a new trade from a college team, and the heroine and hero have some unfinished business from the past. The romance was great and I loved it!

Readers Advisory: Rachel Gibson’s See Jane Score wasn’t a hockey romance that I loved, but the heroine is a reporter, so it’s kind of similar.

Hard Hitter by Sarina Bowen

The second Brooklyn Bruisers book was by far my favorite (although once no. 4 comes out I may change my mind!) Here we have an aging player who is having some physical issues and a yoga instructor/massage therapist who needs to help him, although he has experienced trauma and doesn’t like to be touched. It’s incredible, and also the heroine has a lot of baggage from an abusive relationship that she needs to overcome.

The romance was sizzling hot and I loved seeing the hero come out of his shell and embrace some vulnerability.

Readers Advisory: Hard Knocks by Ruby Lang also has a hockey player with physical challenges and a health care professional, although this one is a neurologist and he has concussions.

Pipe Dreams by Sarina Bowen

This as-of-yet latest book in the series was maybe my least favorite of the three, but that’s like having to rate your three favorite candy bars. Someone’s gotta be in last place, but that definitely doesn’t mean you would toss it!

This one is another second chance romance where the hero and heroine were once together but the hero ends up going back to his estranged wife after she is diagnosed with cancer. You’ve got a single dad and a heroine who decides she’s done waiting for love and going to have a baby on her own. Can the hero win her back or is it too late?

Readers Advisory: For another hockey player romancing a woman who is planning to have a baby without a man, check out Maybe This Love by Jennifer Snow. Isn’t it funny when you can find books that have such similar plot threads but are so different?

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

This was our book club pick for August. It took a really long time for me to get into the story, but once it picked up, it was really good. I liked all the little threads and how it all came together, but it is quite long. I’ve only watched a little bit of the mini series from HBO and wasn’t hooked enough to continue. This book has all the content warnings though. Domestic abuse, murder, a teenager attempting to auction off her virginity on the internet, etc.

Readers Advisory: This is going to be a out-of-nowhere recommendation, but I just finished the podcast In The Dark, and if you like drawn out mysteries revolving a crime and larger societal issues that are at stake, you will definitely enjoy it. (CW: for child rape and murder.)

I just finished a batch of reviews from advanced copies, so check those out. I’ve been reading a lot more than I’ve been reviewing, so I still have lots of books lined up for quick reviews. I should have a few more full reviews before the end of the year, so keep an eye out!

Review: Maybe This Love

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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…?)

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Review: Hard Knocks

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The problem with reviewing this book, and others like it, is that it wasn’t very memorable. Nothing was glaringly awful about it, but it also wasn’t so great that all I can do is wax poetic over it. Partly, I think that’s because the most interesting parts about it were glossed over as the setting. Writing this review, I can hardly even remember the heroine’s name (it was Helen).

The author dances around the topic of her dad’s illness and subsequent descent into dementia, and having her try to battle her inward struggle between her attraction to a hockey player who likely could end up with the same time of brain injury from a violent sport. But there are all these reasons for her reluctance to pursue Adam the hockey player that don’t seem worth wasting the ink on. Her fear of brain injury should be enough. And then, the subplot where they duke it out in public over whether hockey should be banned and the weird Russian mafia guy who has apparently a cadre of concubines on every continent just made the whole thing weird. All of these little pockets of plot could really have been eliminated because they weren’t all that interesting.

I like a enemies-to-lovers trope as much as anyone, but this just seemed way too manufactured. We also get glimpses into Adam’s relationship with his own father but barely enough to go on. The author didn’t let the characters breathe in amongst the plot.

Also, I feel cheated that the adorable scene of ice skating on the cover was not in the book.

Review: See Jane Score

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This book was one of those mediocre books that capture your attention just enough to keep going although the technical aspects aren’t so great. There were some weird choices in wording, strange repetitions, and the plot kind of rushed forward then stalled out a bunch of times. The characters were really great, though, even if the romance itself didn’t seem to be very believable.

Okay, I take that back. Everyone but the heroine was believable. I didn’t understand her motivations or her behavior at all, and I think that is the major shortcoming of the book. There’s a lot of her friend just telling her how she is about relationships, but that doesn’t really make it true to the character. Her development wasn’t very well done. Luc and the rest of the hockey players were great though, I enjoyed them, and I found Luc’s storyline fairly believable and true to an arc. I also loved his interactions with his sister, and how their relationship changes through the book. Jane was too plain.