lightreads

The Long Game

3/5. New M/M hocky romance, long-ish awaited (by the timelines of this industry, anyway) sequel to the rivals one, the most popular of this series.

I went in with some trepidation here because I really liked where the first book left them, stable and happy but firmly closeted and intending to stay that way in the long term. It's not a HEA you get to see much in this genre, which pushes the everyone must come out under any and all circumstances propaganda. And I knew this book would disturb that resolution, and probably by way of making one of them want to come out. I was right, but the reasons for that, and the way that arc of the story develops, are allowed to be complicated and real and painful in ways that made them work for me. This isn't a book about wah wah, I want to kiss my boyfriend on television, wah. This is a book about how secrets can be isolating, and how the cost of that isolation might fall more heavily on one person over another.

That said, *rubs temples*. You know that joke about writing mystery novels that's like when you don't know what to write, do another murder. Instant plot!? Pretty sure for this genre that's when you don't know what to write, out people against their will. Instant plot! It gets old. And it is also really clear that she didn't actually know what to do with the delicate and painful story about mental illness and loneliness and accidental inequities in relationships that she had going, so she just kind of . . . threw a lot of random external events at it instead of letting the internal work breathe, and made it about some other stuff in the end.

Content notes: Depression, and fleeting references to suicidal ideation (done in a way that I thought was real and affecting).

This 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.