pros: I was entertained the entire time and the intimate scenes were pretty well done.
cons: This reads like the fanfiction I read when I was 12.
Look, some of the most profound and devastating writing I’ve encountered has been indie or self published, and some of the traditionally published books I’ve read have been hot garbage. That being said, maybe sometimes there’s a reason a book doesn’t get picked up for trad pub.
I’ll try not to be overly harsh here, but this genuinely felt like a first or second attempt at writing a story. None of the writing was smooth, the dialogue was clumsy and unnatural, and a lot of the details felt unrealistic. I wish I could say Sara being a woman being in the NHL was the most unrealistic part of the novel, but I had to suspend my disbelief so many times throughout this.
Some personal pet peeves of mine, *especially* in published novels, is name dropping and pop culture references. It takes me out of the story as well as dates it. I’m all for authors putting in their personal playlists in the beginning or end of the book (in fact I LOVE it), but at no point do I ever want to know the entire playlist one of the characters queues up for a drive. One song (“Vicious by Bohnes”) was brought up ten times, five of those times being accompanied by the band name. We get it, it’s your favorite song.
Another pet peeve I have is when things are listed out so plainly, especially when it doesn’t matter. This is “feels like a teenager on wattpad wrote it” to me. For example, “I was wearing such and such” and “my pizza had this and this on it, and his pizza had such and such on it.” Seriously, at one point it listed every single ingredient each of the two characters in the scene had on their own pizzas. Why is this important? What does that contribute other than word count?
The dialogue was also extremely unnatural, like I mentioned previously. Unless you’re still learning english, you’re probably going to use contractions more often than not. Sure, there are instances where you’re gonna use “do not” instead of “don’t” for emphasis, but the amount of times we had “will not, do not, I have had,” etc. instead of their shorter, more common versions stood out so much that it took me out of the story. Plus, a lot of the things the characters said to each other just didn’t sound like things people say in real life.
Another gripe, and I say this with zero speculation on the author’s sexuality, is that it feels like it was written by a straight person. The way Josh and Ian talked about their queerness felt unnatural to me.
Also, somewhat unrelated, but i know they’re strong hockey players and all, but if Ian is a big buff hockey player, why is Josh constantly picking him up and slinging him over his shoulder? Why were there multiple times where Josh picked up Ian AND Sara and slung them both over his shoulders? Why are people always being picked up?? And why is there so much damn crying in this book??? I’m not saying people can’t have emotions but ohmygod everyone was crying all the fucking time. Sara was crying every other damn chapter. Ian wasn’t much better. Stop crying ohmygod.
My last gripe (because frankly I’m just ripping this book apart at this point, sorry) is somewhat spoilery. If a police officer is bringing you letters found in a jail cell, why would you feel like the letters would be laced? Why did the letters actually end up being laced?? Any evidence would’ve already gone through testing before being given to a family member. I’m not even into true crime or anything like that but even to me that was so unrealistic.
I think with some honing of her craft, this author can write something great. Like I said, I was entertained the whole time and the sex scenes were hot. I just think maybe she didn’t have a fanfiction/fictionpress/wattpad phase early on enough to get that extra practice in.