Game Changers by Rachel Reid
Nov. 1st, 2020 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThis is a series of pro M/M romances about hockey players. Of course I read them. Discussed below in my reading order (fourth, second, first, third) rather than series order. Overall, I enjoyed them, but do note the lack of women (there's one token best friend per book, basically) and that they completely miss out on team dynamics and really leaning into the big casts you have access to with a hockey team. There's usually one or two friends and no one else so much as gets a name. It's frankly weird. This is hockey as set dressing, not world building.
Common Goal
3/5. Goalie is finishing up his retirement year, with all the complicated feelings that entails, and ends up exploring his bisexuality with a cute bartender fifteen years his junior, but maybe it's more than that. This goalie is a vegetarian yoga practitioner who collects art so, uh, story checks out, LOL. Less convincing is the part where the author seems to think hockey players are hot? Collectively? Which, uh. No.
Heated Rivalry
3/5. The rivals one. There's some Crosby/Ovechkin DNA down there, but this book is doing its own thing. This is a long slide from fuckbuddies to lovers that has a sweetness to it. She's writing a sequel, which I will definitely read, but I'm also a little sad because I liked how this one ended with a kind of complicated happiness for them, and a plan for the future, but it's a far off future and coming out is not at all in the cards for a long time.
Game Changer
2/5. My least favorite. This is the one with all the angst about being closeted. Star player falls for his smoothie guy, smoothie guy is unwilling to live the closeted life, somehow all their issues are resolved by the dramatic outing kiss over the Stanley Cup. I am not into it – this book has all the problems that these sorts of stories have, most centrally that the resolution strongly implies that the real problem is choosing to be closeted and not, like, the many many good safety and security and privacy reasons why a person would feel they needed to make that choice. I'm glad I didn't read this one first, as later books in the series have a much more varied and nuanced take on this and show different ways of being out and not out.
Tough Guy
3/5. The one about the awkward, usually anorgasmic, clinically (he's in treatment) anxious hulking defenseman whose job is fighting on the ice, but who just wants to quietly fall in love with his teenaged flame, the musician who has great makeup game. I mostly liked this one – it's a definite step up in emotional complexity, and it's about a professional athlete who is deeply unhappy doing the thing thousands of people would kill to be doing. But I don't think the ending was constructed particularly well for reasons that would take a lot of words to explain.
Common Goal
3/5. Goalie is finishing up his retirement year, with all the complicated feelings that entails, and ends up exploring his bisexuality with a cute bartender fifteen years his junior, but maybe it's more than that. This goalie is a vegetarian yoga practitioner who collects art so, uh, story checks out, LOL. Less convincing is the part where the author seems to think hockey players are hot? Collectively? Which, uh. No.
Heated Rivalry
3/5. The rivals one. There's some Crosby/Ovechkin DNA down there, but this book is doing its own thing. This is a long slide from fuckbuddies to lovers that has a sweetness to it. She's writing a sequel, which I will definitely read, but I'm also a little sad because I liked how this one ended with a kind of complicated happiness for them, and a plan for the future, but it's a far off future and coming out is not at all in the cards for a long time.
Game Changer
2/5. My least favorite. This is the one with all the angst about being closeted. Star player falls for his smoothie guy, smoothie guy is unwilling to live the closeted life, somehow all their issues are resolved by the dramatic outing kiss over the Stanley Cup. I am not into it – this book has all the problems that these sorts of stories have, most centrally that the resolution strongly implies that the real problem is choosing to be closeted and not, like, the many many good safety and security and privacy reasons why a person would feel they needed to make that choice. I'm glad I didn't read this one first, as later books in the series have a much more varied and nuanced take on this and show different ways of being out and not out.
Tough Guy
3/5. The one about the awkward, usually anorgasmic, clinically (he's in treatment) anxious hulking defenseman whose job is fighting on the ice, but who just wants to quietly fall in love with his teenaged flame, the musician who has great makeup game. I mostly liked this one – it's a definite step up in emotional complexity, and it's about a professional athlete who is deeply unhappy doing the thing thousands of people would kill to be doing. But I don't think the ending was constructed particularly well for reasons that would take a lot of words to explain.