Role Model by Rachel Reid
Sep. 24th, 2021 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsRole Model by Rachel Reid
3/5. Another queer "hockey"* romance, this one about a former minor antagonist from prior books getting traded to the worst team in the league after calling out a star for sexual assault. He finds a team full of nice people, and also the team's apple farmer social media manager.
Pleasant, but mostly just made me want the next book, not out yet, which will explain what the hell is going on with Ilya Rozanov, which LBR is mostly what I care about at this point. Also, I'm not sure how to react when a book calls itself out so accurately and then does nothing about it? Like, the arc of this book is this guy trying to be less of an asshole, and at one point his mother says to him something like, "you know you could try actually making friends with women," and he agrees and then does absolutely nothing of the sort because, oh wait, there are no women in this book aside from his mom. Awkward!
Anyway, the author said somewhere that this was going to be a considerably dark book, but then it wasn't because she wrote it during the pandemic and didn't want to write that book. Fair enough. This version does have its sweetness, though I suspect the darker version would have been better as a piece of writing.
*In quotes because the hockey remains entirely unimportant. Like, this guy is a professional athlete, but we only see him running on the beach once because he's shirtless and sexy. We never see him getting up early to fit in a workout, or adjusting his diet, or nursing an injury, or etc. etc. etc. Expect a romance novel with a vague notional hockey world in the background, but no real effort to bring that to life.
Content notes: Familial homophobia, mentions of offscreen sexual assault of strangers.
3/5. Another queer "hockey"* romance, this one about a former minor antagonist from prior books getting traded to the worst team in the league after calling out a star for sexual assault. He finds a team full of nice people, and also the team's apple farmer social media manager.
Pleasant, but mostly just made me want the next book, not out yet, which will explain what the hell is going on with Ilya Rozanov, which LBR is mostly what I care about at this point. Also, I'm not sure how to react when a book calls itself out so accurately and then does nothing about it? Like, the arc of this book is this guy trying to be less of an asshole, and at one point his mother says to him something like, "you know you could try actually making friends with women," and he agrees and then does absolutely nothing of the sort because, oh wait, there are no women in this book aside from his mom. Awkward!
Anyway, the author said somewhere that this was going to be a considerably dark book, but then it wasn't because she wrote it during the pandemic and didn't want to write that book. Fair enough. This version does have its sweetness, though I suspect the darker version would have been better as a piece of writing.
*In quotes because the hockey remains entirely unimportant. Like, this guy is a professional athlete, but we only see him running on the beach once because he's shirtless and sexy. We never see him getting up early to fit in a workout, or adjusting his diet, or nursing an injury, or etc. etc. etc. Expect a romance novel with a vague notional hockey world in the background, but no real effort to bring that to life.
Content notes: Familial homophobia, mentions of offscreen sexual assault of strangers.