I didn’t love Changing the Game  but enjoyed The Perfect Play and I was excited to read about the youngest Riley, Jenna. Jenna is the only girl of the Riley family and despite (or maybe because of) being around sports all of her life, she has sworn of all athletes. Not dating athletes is difficult as Jenna’s two older brothers are professional athletes and she runs the family sports bar that is populated by local professional athletes including members of city’s the pro hockey team.

Tyler Anderson, one of those pro hockey players, takes an interest in Jenna Riley but she turns him down. Almost immediately, Ty begins a relentless pursuit of Jenna.

She locked the door behind him, then turned to tell Tyler to go, but he wasn’t in the kitchen. She found him in the bar pouring a whiskey.

“Hey. Last call was an hour ago.”

He smiled at her, tipped the glass to his lips, and downed the drink in one swallow, then put money on the top of the bar. She grabbed the money and slipped it into her pocket.

“Pocketing the profits, I see.”

“No, smart-ass. I already closed out the register. I’ll add it in tomorrow.”

He shook his head and leaned against the bar. “This is how you talk to your customers?”

“You stopped being a customer when you came behind my bar and served up drinks.”

“You needed help.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He folded his arms. “Are you always this bitchy, or just to me?”

“Just to you. Now get your ass out of here so I can finish closing up.”

The entire overtone of this book was that Ty knows best.  Ty knows that Jenna wants him. Ty knows that she needs help behind the bar. Ty knows that Jenna’s distaste for athletes doesn’t apply to him. Ty knows that Jenna should pursue this special ability. Ty knows that she should be pursuing it now and in certain ways even if Jenna protests.

She took a step back. “Why the hardcore press here, Ty?”

“Come on, Jenna. You’re not a kid. You know why. I’ve been coming to the bar a lot, hanging around. I like you.”

“I don’t like you.”

He laughed. “Liar. I see the way you look at me.”

“You are so full of yourself, Anderson. Go pick up another girl. I’m not the least bit interested in you.” She brushed past him and headed to the door, waiting for him to meet her there so she could set the alarm.

He did, his coat in hand. She had her fingers on the keypad ready to turn on the alarm.

“Wait a second,” he said.

“Did you forget something?”

“Yeah.” He hauled her into his arms before she could take her next breath, and his mouth came down on hers.

Instead of finding this charming, I found it unsettlingly paternalistic, particularly late in the book when Jenna’s refusal to fall into line with Ty’s timeline and plans leads him to having a tantrum. I also felt that no one was really on Jenna’s side. Everyone encouraged Ty to push Jenna. Maybe Jenna did need pushing but I wasn’t convinced that Ty’s pushing was done out of love versus him just wanting his way all the time due to him believing that he always knew the right decision.

Jenna attempts to deter Ty’s interest by dating other men.  One of the guys was genuinely nice and interesting and I found myself wishing Jenna would fall for him and not return Ty’s interest, but alas, that wasn’t the story.

I admit to being kind of worn down by the incredible success of all the Rileys.  Eldest Riley brother is a star NFL quarterback, middle Riley brother is a star baseball player, cousin is a star wide receiver, and now Jenna’s got a secret special ability.  Jenna’s secret and amazing ability was my least favorite part of the story, lent a spirit of over the top inauthenticity, and created a conflict that I disliked.

What I thought was a great conflict — the family dynamic of how Jenna felt forgotten and pushed aside in her family and how running the bar was not what she wanted — was given little attention and was undeveloped. I would have liked to have seen more of the family dynamic and resentment from Jenna. Instead, I had unrelenting reminders of how happy everyone was from the previous books.   I think if a reader likes the Ty type of character, this could be a very fulfilling book. I never warmed up to him and I wished Jenna would have found someone else. C

Best regards,

Jane

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Related posts:

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2. REVIEW: The Perfect Play by Jaci Burton
3. REVIEW: Changing the Game by Jaci Burton

This book was originally reviewed by Jayne about four years ago, and I intended to read it after she wrote her review but then other books caught my attention and I forgot.  I ended up buying this book in January because it was included on a sports romance list at Goodreads.  It had a great setup.  A formerly abused woman falls in love with a hockey player who happens to be the enforcer on a pro hockey team.  She has an intense and instinctive dislike for violence. When her first encounter with Eric Cameron is in the emergency room after a bar fight, he seems to fulfill all her preconceived notions about hockey players.

Jayne’s problems resided primarily in the multitude of conflicts that existed in the story and while that was problematic for me, my main dislikes were the lack of realism to the hockey and the portrayal of domestic abuse, the latter being used as a prop.

Emily Jordan is an emergency doctor raising her son in Minneapolis, struggling with student loan debt. Eric becomes interested in Emily immediately despite (or because of) her prickly responses to his mild overtures. He begins to pursue her in earnest and isn’t above taking advantage of her son’s hero interest in him to inveigle invitations to pizza and movies. Emily has to come to terms with Eric’s profession in order for them to have a life together.

Unfortunately, the book was all promise and little delivery. I never bought into Eric as a professional hockey player.  Jayne disagreed. She’s not familiar with sports and felt that there was enough to feel authentic for her.

Eric spent far too little time on the ice and far too much time pursuing Emily.  The amount of free time he had during the story which was set close to the start of the playoffs and then continued throughout until the end of the season was not believable.  But even more than that was his entire attitude toward actually playing the sport. At one point, Eric offers to pick her kid up and take him out to dinner so that Emily can get some much needed rest even though he had to be on a plane for an away game. He says “I’ll tell them I had an emergency. Catch a later flight.”

The gesture is gallant but what kind of professional hockey player or professional athlete would simply lie about his absence at an away game? Perhaps if the story included a storyline about Eric’s fading desire for the game (which might be believable after having previously won four championships), this would have made sense, but instead it just rang my inauthentic bell.  The reference to The Lord Stanley’s Cup, the positioning of Eric as an enforcerer and a lead scorer of the team and the repeated insinuation that he drove divisiveness within his own team by turning people against a co captain all contributed to a lack of believability.

I wasn’t convinced of why he would so ardently pursue Emily when she was constantly telling him no and, even beyond that, being rude and insulting to him.

The abuse angle could have been employed with a greater degree of believability as well. Emily’s ex husband was abusive, patterned behavior he learned from his father. Despite living in the same town as her ex and his very wealthy and prominent family, Emily somehow manages to conceal that she has a son. I found this one of the more bizarre coincidences in the book. The ex doesn’t become a danger to Emily until after she starts dating Eric, convenient for the story, but the ex’s rage induced actions seem almost cartoonish and paint by number, diminishing any tension or impact.  I think that this might have been, in part, what Jayne referred to as the ever building number of conflicts introduced in the story.

While I appreciate the storyline of the abused woman reclaiming herself, I felt like it was more of a contrivance, particularly when the former mother in law who was also abused explains that the new girlfriend of the abuser treated the abuser like a “lap dog” and that the abuser tolerated it because the new girlfriend had “power he craves, the status…the money.” I had a hard time believing that a man who was raised to beat women and went on to beat women would allow himself to be treated like a “lap dog.” Instead, I felt like the characters were manipulated in order to have these big dramatic moments. It was irritating rather than interesting.

Finally, I found the book rather slow until about 70% of the story was completed as Emily played a push/pull game with Eric. The last third of the story was fast paced and contained a lot of drama, even if some of it was manufactured.

This was not a self published book and thus I will take a moment to complain about the formatting and editing. There were several areas in which paragraphs ran together, particularly dialogue. There were numerous quotation errors where quotation marks were omitted either at the opening or close of dialogue. There was no table of contents either. It was an amateurish product that I paid for. D

Best regards,

Jane

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My favorite books have always been your hockey books and I’ve recommended “Body Check” to any number of readers looking for a modern contemporary romance. We were given locker rooms scenes and game scenes and while none of it may have been authentic, it felt authentic to me.  We then detoured into a number of books involving non hockey players and found ourselves in Ireland.  ”Breakaway” attempts to bring the hockey to Ireland but unfortunately the only real sports connection is that the hero is a hockey player.  The focus of “Breakaway” is on the reunited lovers theme.

The male protagonist is Rory Brady, the first Irish born hockey player to play for the New York Blades.  He dated a girl from Balleycraig, Ireland, for eight years and promised he would marry her.  When he left for the NHL, he was going to bring her with him, but once he arrived on U.S. soil he promptly forgot her caught up in living the high life as a professional athlete in New York City.

Erin O’Brien was stuck in her village, slaving away for her parents and dreaming of getting an art degree. She gave Rory an ultimatum that they marry or they are done. So he breaks up with her. He essentially leaves everyone in Balleycraig behind, including his best friend. Two years later Rory decides he has made a mistake.

I thought, based on the blurb and set put, that this would be a redemption story and that Rory would have to suffer consequences of his actions in order to win over his best friend and win back his girl. Unfortunately there was no comeuppance.  Rory waltzes in.  His best friend, Jake, forgives him.  Erin takes him back without almost no whimper. What makes it even more sad was that Jake, the nice steady guy, tried to woo Erin after Rory left her and at the cusp of the two of them exploring something deeper than a close friendship, Rory returns and Erin can’t take her pants off fast enough.

I didn’t understand Erin at all.  She had a wonderful man who was ready to commit to her, but instead she readily accepts Rory back into her life who left her two years ago. I didn’t feel that the depiction was consistent with Erin’s portrayal as someone stuck in a rut, unable to muster the courage to leave her village to explore the big world beyond and pursue her dreams. Settling into a marriage with her best friend Jake would have made more sense than sliding back into a relationship with Rory. Returning to Rory’s arms with no resistance after stating that she was mistrustful and hurt led to a story with little conflict.

Eerin’s inaction creates a certain aura of passive aggressiveness. If she wanted to leave so badly, why didn’t she?  Unanswered was whether she didn’t love Jake because he represented stagnation and wanted Rory because he represented the incarnation of her own dreams – success outside in the big world, a conflict that might have retained some interest. Yet, if that were the case then the romance isn’t true because Erin doesn’t love Rory for who he is (and who would, really) but rather what he represents.

It is a small town setting but the small town relies too much on quirky characters to give it personality such as the three brothers who seem to be an Irish version of Larry, Curly and Moe. Three dumb and loose lipped individuals we see only in the Balleycraig pub and only as set up characters for Rory’s actions.

Rory seemed to exemplify the rich jock who treats everyone shabbily and gets only accolades in return. There wasn’t anything compelling about him. He never suffered or wanted for success, love, or even happiness. A conflict arising out of Erin’s fear of independence came far too late. A disappointing entry in the Blades series. C-

Best regards,

Jane

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo

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Older women-younger men must be the new vampires. I’m seeing quite a lot of it in the past few months but that didn’t stop me from picking this one up. What can I say, I’m weak for (hot, hunky, muscled) sports heroes.

So, um plot. Older heroine who hooks up with her younger brother’s best friend who is ten years younger than she is. Shayne is a hockey player but – a goalie! He’s got great hands but can’t shoot for shit. He is hot for Lacey now that she’s tossed her two timing asshat husband out for shacking up with a twenty-two year old twinkie. But as much as Lacey’s loving the incendiary sex, she knows that this relationship is doomed. He’s younger, he’s her brother’s best friend, plus her youngest daughter is pissed about Lacey’s upcoming divorce and thinks her mom’s the villain while her dad can do no wrong. There’s just no way this can end well. Can it?

Well, you certainly set the {scene} for the type of sex we’re going to see in this book. I mean right off the bat from page one with Shayne’s sizzling hot mental images of what he’d like to do to and with Lacey. Most of which, if not all of which, eventually gets done. I hope Lacey enjoys it during the off season because I’m just not sure that any man, even if he’s only twenty nine, can keep up this level of sexing and a pro hockey career going at the same time. But Lacey’s the perfect age to appreciate his skills. And he certainly is skillful. Lacey produces more cream than the combined dairy herds of the entire state of Wisconsin as Shayne brings her to yet another mind bending orgasm. All women should suffer such a fate.

Initially the fact that Lacey is ten years older than Shayne didn’t bother me. When you threw in the fact that she used to baby sit for him and her little brother, that did get a touch skeevy. But these two are also fully aware of how the world will view their relationship. And also aware that they themselves don’t think it will last. So when it keeps lasting, and their hearts ache at the thought of separating and they agonize about the whole thing, I felt a little better that they weren’t blowing off the issues or papering over the problems.

Lacey’s relationship with her daughter Carmen is one reason I never wanted to become a mother. I don’t think I could stand the pain of my flesh and blood hurting so much and taking the opportunity to hurt me back. Mothers deserve medals for making it through their daughters’ teenage years. But what Shayne tells Lacey is so true – that Carmen acts out and acts up because she knows Lacey loves her regardless and will always love her and deep down, Carmen loves her mother just as fiercely.

There’s ample abundance of just how well Shayne and Lacey get along sexually. But I like that you include non sexing scenes of them. Scenes that show how much these two are truly coming to care for and love each other. When Lacey is hurting, Shayne’s first thoughts are to get to her quickly and do whatever he can to help her. When Shayne is losing it on the ice, Lacey can’t bear to be so far from him. And also some scenes of just how hard this relationship is going to be to keep going. The reality moments and less than perfect times that every couple share. I’m not quite sure how they’re going to work out forever since the book is rather open ended but I’m sure they will.

The “I’ve known him since he was four years old” aspects of the story still sort of squick me and Lacey’s brother certainly gets a touch womanly in his ability to parse through what’s ailing Shayne and in urging Lacey to fix her relationship with Shayne but I ended up liking the story and seeing Shayne and Lacey stumble towards their HEA. I just hope Lacey’s going to be able to handle those steamy Houston summers. B

~Jayne

Book Link | Kindle | All Romance eBooks | Liquid Silver

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There was a mark granted to a person in Hong Kong for Navy Seals Team that has since been abandoned attached to PLASTIC TOYS, NAMELY, ACTION FIGURES and ACCESSORIES THEREFORE, TOY GUNS, CARS and TRUCKS, MOTORCYCLES, WATER GUNS and Men, stylized, including men depicted in caricature form and  Astronauts (men); Frogmen; Men, other, including frogmen, men wearing space suits and men wearing monocles; Monocles (men wearing) and Dart boards; Targets without crosshairs or alignment guides.

There is also a current mark granted for PADI SEAL TEAM for :Educational services, namely conducting classes, seminars, and workshops in the field of aquatics, diving with self contained breathing apparatus, snorkeling, safety, and oceanography, substantially directed toward youth programs; entertainment in the nature of free diving, diving with self contained breathing apparatus, and snorkeling exhibitions substantially directed toward youth programs.”

And MetroGames US trademarked “Team 6″ in reference to “Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line computer games”

The Disney mark doesn’t specifically address books but rather “entertainment services” but my guess is that publishers, who are notoriously risk averse, won’t be anxious to naming a series of books “Team 6″ in the future.

****

There is a fascinating debate that took place over at the Guardian on the issue of whether women should watch what they wear or whether what they wear can incite sexual violence.  This was touched on by Robin’s piece a couple of weeks ago about sex and the rape fantasy.

Unless, for example, we subject the entire argument to a reversal of logic. Instead of the argument above, let’s try this one: If we had no inequality between men and women, we would not see sexual submission or dominance as symbolic of that inequity. But because we do have so much inequity, it’s easy to see sexual behavior and sexual desire through that same lens. However, isn’t it possible that these two things are completely separate? That we can enjoy equity in the boardroom and power plays in the bedroom?

Woman have to watch what they wear, is the argument of some, because men are so weak that they believe that anyone wearing a short skirt and having imbibed too much liquor must also want to have sex, even if they say no.

Julie Bindel: That’s a terribly sad indictment of masculinity today. Why aren’t we telling men: stop raping women? Rather than women celebrating this misogynistic term “sluttiness”. What is different about what the Canadian police officer said and what police officers have said through time immemorial when killers and serial rapists are on the loose, which is: “Women, don’t go out on your own at night, stay indoors.” They don’t say to men: “There’s a curfew on you.” The curfew is on us. What’s different from what the chief constable of West Yorkshire said during the Yorkshire Ripper reign to this Canadian police officer? Men are the ones harming women.

and

Vicky Simister: I do think women have become objectified, but that is a separate point. Society does not say don’t rape, it says don’t get raped. Everywhere you look, the onus is on the woman to not experience harassment, and there’s very little to say, actually we condemn rape. Only 6.5% of all rape cases end in conviction. That shows this attitude is extremely dangerous. The fact that Shaista can cover it up and get respect is great for her as an individual, but for a gender I think it’s terrible.

In contrast:

Jo-Anne Nadler: I’m really interested in what Brix said, she was playing a role, but that role sends out a particular message. You were wearing the uniform of the street walker, and therefore you made yourself vulnerable to being misinterpreted. While I found the way the policeman expressed himself completely inappropriate, and women should not be held responsible for an attack on them, I do wonder about a lot of the fashion now, with young girls particularly dressing very provocatively, and perhaps they don’t realise the subliminal message they send out. So there is an interpretation of what the policeman said, more sympathetic to his view, which is that actually women can be making themselves vulnerable, particularly young girls. Our very sexualised society puts pressure on young girls to dress that way. If they gave it more thought, they wouldn’t feel comfortable with what they were saying about themselves.

Anyway, it’s a fascinating discussion.

****

I know that there are quite a few authors who think these numbers won’t mean anything until they are above the 50% mark and those authors would be wrong because reach of an author’s book is only one factor.

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/sarahw/status/65520017495691264"]

Another sign that consumers are moving away from physical media? DVD sales have dropped 40% in the last year.

*****

Will romance books featuring hockey heroes ignore the state of the game?  Very few of the hockey romances today deal with the issue of concussions.

In fact, in both recent release from Rachel Gibson, Any Man of Mine, and Deirdre Martin, Icebreaker, featuring an “enforcer” type of character. In Icebreaker, the hero is actually being charged with assault for a particularly tough hit.  Although Martin’s book, Penalty Box, does have a hero is forced out of the game at the height of his career because of concussions.

Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, the league’s biggest name, missed the finals months of the 2010-11 season after he sustained a concussion in January.

Earlier this year, the devastating effects of repeated head trauma were highlighted by a post-mortem examination on the brain of Bob Probert, one of hockey’s most famous brawlers.

The results showed Probert suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative disease similar to Alzheimer’s that is thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head.

*****

Speaking of sports in romances, there are a couple of romance authors writing about bull riders in the PBR circuit.  Chad Ochocinco, a flamboyant wide receiver in the NFL, agreed to ride a bull upon the challenge of the COO of the Professional Bull Riders.

Ochocinco basically got bucked off in the chute which he says is “embarrassing” but helped to do what the PBR folks hoped it would – bring to the attention of a wider audience that bull riders are real athletes.  The goal is to stay on for eight seconds.  Cat Johnson and Lorelie James write about the PBR circuit but my favorite author who writes about cowboys and rodeos would be Anne MacAllister.  Her older Silhouette Desires are being digitized but not my favorite which is The Eight Second Wedding.

*****

I loved this article about the supposed slate of a family of Android devices Amazon is purportedly cooking up, everything from a smartphone to an iPad rival.  It took Bezos a while to come up with a decent looking design for the Kindle so I am recoiling a bit with horror at what these tablet devices might look like.

*****

Here is an interesting (albeit a bit degrading) article on romance readers as the driving force behind ebooks today.  Harlequin is an innovator in the digital book field and last quarter contributed 50% of Torstar’s operating profit. What is it about romance books that makes ordinary journalists try to emulate a passage in the article itself?  As I said previously, the rise of digital publishing makes reach not as important.  Jenna Petersen notes in the article

“I can charge a lot less to the reader and actually make more money per book,” notes Petersen, who also writes the Passionate Pen, a romance industry blog. Where a typical contract would return 60 cents in author royalties on the sale of a $7.99 novel, Petersen explains, she nets $2 of every $2.99 online sale through Amazon. “So I sell a third as many books and make the same amount of money.”

Petersen is trying to put out a title a month.  This urge to churn out content makes me queasy as a reader. Are we getting anything of quality these days?  Another epublisher will be putting out three books a day soon. 3 a day, 7 days a week.

*****

Finally, I am going to use this space to gripe about something today. I am really REALLY sick and tired of the scene where the heroine is looking at a sunset or a landscape and says “beautiful” and then the hero repeats the word and instead of looking at the sunset, he is looking at her.  The first ten times I read this passage, I might have liked it but now I hate it. It’s lazy and trite and the next time I read it, I am going to delete the passage from the book.

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In keeping with our unintentional sports week here at Dear Author (what with the reviews of Icebreaker and Huddle With Me Tonight and my Ode to Donald Driver), I thought I should go ahead and post a review of your latest Blaze release. In the past couple of years, I’ve really come to look forward to your Blaze books. They seem modern in tone and I’ve liked that you’ve included multicultural characters in your books. Unfortunately, in Face Off, I felt like the space constraints really limited the stories you were trying to tell and ultimately the romances suffered for it.

Ice Time

Face Off is a compilation of three shorts focused on the romances of the three McBride siblings. First up is Jarrad McBride, a former hockey star whose last body check left him with reduced peripheral vision and ended his hockey career. Jarrad’s despair over no longer being in the NHL is compounded by the fact that his swimsuit model wife divorced him and hooked up with an NBA star (trading up or so say the tabloids). At the urging of his best friend, Greg, Jarrad returns to his hometown in Vancouver to help Greg and his fellow policemen and firefighters field a hockey team to play in the The World Police and Firefighter Games hockey championship. Shortly after arriving back home, Jarrad finds himself inept at coaching but his troubles are soothed by meeting Sierra Janssen, an elementary school teacher at the hockey rink. Sierra has been roped into learning to play hockey with some girlfriends. (I guess they have girls’ leagues in Canada?).

The problem isn’t the setup. I could buy the setup. It’s that the story is told in fast forward. We go from meet and greet to bed to I love you in a whirlwind matter of hours it seems. Whatever emotional trauma either were suffering was a convenient overlay on top of two or three scenes that provide the basis for the romance. Unfortunately this might have been a story I could have really enjoyed had it been more than just a sketch. Both Sierra and Jarrad were drawn as sympathetic characters but the romance was unbelievable and contrived to me in the tiny space it was allotted. D.

In The Sin Bin

Samantha McBride stars in the second novella. She is a hotshot lawyer whose high school sweetheart is her brother Jarrad’s best friend, Greg Olsen.   Greg had once proposed to Sam on the eve of her leaving for law school but instead of viewing it as a romantic proposal that would cement the relationship that they had built since they were teens, Sam viewed it as Greg’s attempt to control her and a sign of his belief that she wouldn’t be faithful to him.

Despite living in the same city since she became a lawyer (or is it barrister in Canada?), Sam and Greg have managed to avoid each other but neither stops thinking of each other.   Reunited lover stories almost always work better in a short space and I think because there was past emotion that the reader could fill in, this story worked better.

However, I wasn’t sure that whatever had been the main problem between Sam and Greg was ever resolved ten years later.   Was Sam afraid Greg wanted to control her? He never evinced any such desire.   He was never, even in reminisces, portrayed as an overbearing control monger.   Was it that Sam just wasn’t ready to be married and now she was?   It appeared that most of the story was told from Sam’s point of view and thus Gabe’s emotional arc was a definite afterthought.   C

Breakaway

This last story worked the best for me but ultimately lacked the proper build up like the others.   Taylor McBride has been invited to participate in a charity event wherein he will dance with silver Olympic figure skating medalist Becky Haines, Canada’s Skating Sweetheart.   Taylor is on the farm team, trying to make it to the big leagues like his big brother.   Becky is working on winning the gold.

The two go from meeting to sniping to meeting in a bar to the bedroom.   In one day, I believe, although it’s not explicitly laid out as such.

Becky’s entire life is regimented from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed by her mother who arranges for her publicity events to her militant coach.   Yet, despite being told this, Becky is shown slacking off her duties to have sex with Taylor almost immediately.   There was no indication previously that she had anything but the gold medal in mind.

Taylor had almost no sibling rivalry with his older, more successful brother.   His only concern was dropping Becky.   I really, really appreciated how much respect he had for Becky and her athletic endeavors.   I found that refreshing.

Ultimately, though, I struggled with the love relationship of the two and thought that the epilogue was overly treacly.   Two weddings in the planning stage and one more to come!   I mean, I appreciate the solidity of the HEA but I think I wished that the words had gone to building up the relationships so that we could have figured out the epilogue without it being explicitly stated.   C

If a reader can set aside the need for emotional buildup and accept the relationships as they are presented, these stories provide a short, fun read. I liked all the characters. I liked the setup.   There was believable conflict and backstory.   Essentially there was a ton of promise, but I was terribly disappointed in how everything seemed to be getting the short shrift from emotional development to character arc.

Best regards

Jane

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I looked through the archives but I couldn’t find a review of this book   at Dear Author which is such a shame because it is one of my favorite contemporary romances and one of my favorite sports romances.   I recently re-read (and purchased a new digital copy to replace my paperback) this book after reading your upcoming return to the New York Blades, Icebreaker.

I remember that this book came out in 2003 about two or three months after Rachel Gibson’s See Jane Score, another book featuring a hockey virgin falling in love with a hockey player.   Whenever I recommend this book to someone, I always say that one of the best things about the book is the very modern feel to the relationship.   The story is set in New York.   Ty and Janna read like two very urban individuals.   Ty and Janna fall into bed, break up, get back together, break up again, and ultimately find a believable happy ever after together.

Janna is lured away from her position as a publicist for a popular soap opera to work in the publicity office of the New York Blades.   The Blades have been bought by Kidco and want the publicity staff to start cleaning up the image of the team.   Last year, after winning the Stanley Cup, pictures were leaked of some of the Blade players with the Cup at a strip club having the strippers perform certain deeds with the Cup.

Janna’s knowledge of hockey is small but she knows a lot about publicity.   She creates a sign up sheet with a number of charity events in the area. She wants each player to sign up for one of them.   Ty Gallagher, the captain, however, is quite resistant to cleaning up his image and sucking up to his corporate bosses.   He brought them the Cup last year and he’ll bring it to them again this year and winning should be enough.

Janna quickly realizes that Ty is the team leader both on and off the court.   If he signs up for charitable events, the rest of the team will follow.   She pursues him relentlessly and it is her dogged pursuit, her unwillingness to back down in the face of his stern denial that makes him interested in her as a person because those are the very same traits Ty brings to the ice each time he plays.

Being persistent is Janna’s thing.   As the middle sister whose older sister is an overachiever lawyer and whose young sister is a model, Janna’s determination and perseverance set her apart.   She took the label and it defined her.   Failure was not an option.

Janna slowly erodes the resistance of other players, setting up magazine shoots and getting a few of the younger men into charity events where they can squire around young hot models.   Unfortunately, Ty is immovable but he cannot help admire Janna’s tenacity.

The two don’t fall into bed immediately. Instead they banter, fight, flirt, and ultimately have sex. Their interactions were always entertaining and believable. Ty weasels Janna’s address out of her boss to apologize for showing up at a party, inadvertently with her model sister on his arm.

"Nice place."

"Glad you like it. Now tell me why you didn't call."

"I'll tell you when you put your glasses back on."

"I told you, I don't need my glasses except for reading."

"Bull, you're squinting at me like Mr. Magoo. How many fingers am I holding up?"

Janna angrily folded her arms across her chest. "Sorry, I'm not playing this game."

"How many fingers?"

"Fine," Janna huffed. She squinted harder and craned her neck forward. "Two."

"Wrong. Three. Put 'em back on, Janna. They're not as bad as you think."

"That's easy for you to say, you don't wear glasses."

"Yeah, I do. I wear contacts most of the time, just like you. Now put 'em back on."

Sighing, she donned her glasses, the world springing back into Technicolor.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes," she was forced to admit. "Now tell me why you didn't call."

"Because I thought you might not talk to me." He paused. "That you'd even hang up on me."

Even in 2003, the immediate bedroom (or no bedroom) hookup was prevalent and this story stood out as something different.   I could see the two of them strike sparks off each other when they fought over PR commitments.   By the time the two did have sex, it made sense.   I understood what attracted Ty to Janna, something different from the beautiful models (like her sister) that he usually slept with.   I understood what attracted Janna to Ty, something different than the usual boneheaded athlete on the make.

Ty challenged Janna to think of herself in terms of achievement instead of effort. He was kind to her brother.   When he exerted himself, he was lethally charming.   Janna wasn’t impressed with Ty’s stature, nor his position.   He irritated her as much as he attracted her.   But in the end, the two could not keep their hands off each other. Their relationship is carried out in secret.   Janna didn’t want her position to as publicist for the Blades to be threatened and Ty was well known for his meaningless liasons during the hockey season.

Ty (referred to as the warrior monk in later Blade books) was an athlete of the old school.   No two athletic events in a row, meaning no sex before a game.   During the hockey season, particularly the playoffs, Ty ate, breathed, dreamed, lived hockey.   No women allowed.   When his game begins to suffer, Ty believes that it is his ongoing relationship with Janna that is the cause.   Further complicating the matter is that Janna’s roommate, Theresa, is assaulted by one of Ty’s roommates.   Ty and Janna don’t see eye to eye on this issue and their differing opinions causes friction. There is one point in which Janna tells Ty off, making him sit through a diatribe about how he is a coward for not being able to handle two things at once.   I really appreciated that.   Rather than slink off and lick her wounds (although she does that too) she really gives it to him.   And Ty doesn’t have an epiphany right there either because that wouldn’t be natural.

Everything about Ty and Janna’s relationship, the hockey, her PR, her interaction with her roommate, Ty’s devotion to his game, was very authentic. There was a scene in the book where Ty and Janna are at a bar post game after a very big win and Ty is uncharacteristically drinking a little heavier than normal. Janna catches Ty encouraging the waitress to pile on more carrots. It seemed ordinary yet so normal that Ty, a little tipsy, would be pranking his teammates in such a silly way.   One area that I would have liked to have seen is more of Ty’s background.   We knew a lot about Janna, her wealthy parents’ messy marriage, her younger brother’s struggle in the family, her difficulties with her own future.   Ty is an enigma, of sorts.   His whole life, backward and forward was hockey.   Maybe this was intentional.   Maybe he was birthed as a result of an unholy relationship between his absent father and a magical zamboni.   It’s pretty vague.

I also loved the locker room scenes. Of course, I have no idea if these are believable. I’ve watched my share of NFL Total Access on the NFL channel but I doubt we are seeing anything but a very sanitized version of locker room activities but it was authentic enough. Plus, there is something engaging about being behind the wizard’s curtain, so to speak.

Ty didn't care if some of his guys had been out on the town the night before, or if others were looking forward to stretching out in the sweet bosom of their family with bagels and coffee while reading the Sunday Times. The choice of the day and the hour had been deliberate, another of his devices for testing team loyalty. And when Ty said eight, he didn't mean eightish. He meant eight.

There is one discordant part of the book and I don’t know whether I fully believe in the results of the team’s actions toward one of the players. I’ve debated it with myself and I’ll put down my indecision to the fact that I don’t know hockey well enough to believe that team discipline can have a lasting effect on someone’s life.

I enjoyed this book when I read it back when it was first released and it was still good when I took it out for a re-read recently. B+

Best regards,

Jane

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As an aside, Troy Aikmen, after retirement, married a former publicist of the Dallas Cowboys.   I’m not sure if that served as any inspiration for the story or not.

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I’ve really loved some of your past Superromances particularly because I think you do such a great job of creating authentic, believable people in your stories. While the prose was still strong, I felt that the pacing was a bit slow, the ending was a bit too dramatic and the characters weren’t quite as vivid.

Clare Sampson has had trouble allowing anyone to create permanent bonds with her. She takes this to extremes by moving her and her son all over the country taking on new computer consulting jobs. This might not have presented a problem but for her son, Tim, a 13 year old tired of their nomadic existence. He doesn’t want to make new friends, attend a new school, join new clubs each and every year. The fact that Clare never realized this seems a bit odd and her surprise at Tim’s unhappiness seems almost disingenuous or, at the very least, myopic. Clare’s latest stop is upstate New York and Tim has joined the youth hockey team even though he has never played hockey before.

Allie is the 13 year old daughter of Bryan James, a former high school hockey star who went to college on a hockey scholarship and subsequently ruined his future one drunken night that resulted in a knee injury. His ex wife got a choice gig as a celebrity hairstylist for a reality tv show in California and Bryan is single parenting for the first time in his life. It’s not going well. His daughter Allie is getting into fights at school and refusing to talk to him.

Neither Clare or Bryan came off as insightful parents (or the ex wife for that matter) yet Allie and Tim were presented as fairly well adjusted minus a few slamming of doors and fighting. Allie, in particular, seemed a bit paint by numbers given that Bryan was never around before her mom up and left and now her mom has up and left. For a book that centered around Clare and Bryan’s relationships with their kids, I just felt that Allie and Tim were underdrawn even if their conflicts, emotions, rebellions seemed reasonable for their age.

Allie and Tim are both on the youth hockey team in upstate New York and engage in fisticuffs at the rink. If they don’t participate in mediation, Allie will get thrown off the team and then the team won’t make State. Clare doesn’t like this but when she is confronted with the reality that everyone in the town will hate her son and her if Allie is kicked off, she quickly assents to mediation. The mediation involves the kids engaging in six weeks of group activity with their parents which places Clare and Bryan in close proximity; not to mention their meetings at the hockey arena.

I wondered if there wasn’t too much going on in this book. The teenage anxiety could have been sufficient for one book but through in two teenagers suffering from identity crisis and abandonment, throw in Clare’s inability to allow someone else into her life, Bryan’s unexplained failed marriage, and the nearly non existent ex wife, I felt that each issue only received a cursory look.

Then there the issues that weren’t addressed.   Bryan sits down and works out his finances at one point as his problems with Allie are endangering his job.   Clare, however, is only supposed to be in the town for a little under one year.   There is no mention as to whether there would be any work for her after this contract is over.   Even if she wanted to settle down, would she financially be able to do so?   Then there was the burgeoning teen romance between Allie and Tim.   How would that be affected by Clare and Bryan’s relationship?   How would Allie respond to Clare’s insertion into their lives when Allie’s mother had recently abandoned her?

Clare played the prickly closed role v. Bryan’s more open, willing to take chances, role. The romance doesn’t really pick up toward the latter half of the book. What results in the resolution of Clare’s conflict – her unwillingness to open up and make herself emotionally vulnerable by becoming attached to something (a town) or someone (Bryan) – really frustrated me and I felt that it was a rushed ending which wasn’t half as thoughtful as most of the book. C

Best regards,

Jane

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I am a slut for your hockey theme books. You can give me improbable plots and unlikeable characters but it you throw hockey into the mix, I will give up for your stories. Why? I like to watch big, strong macho guys fall for women who initially drive them nuts and I like to see woman who are horrified at the thought of falling for hockey players fall anyway.

Six months ago, hockey superstar Mark Bressler’s life was turned upside down by a horrific car accident. Now forced into early retirement and struggling with his new physical reality, he’s made a new career out of getting rid of the nurses and “minders” that the Seattle Chinooks team keeps trying to foist on him.

Chelsea Ross is to be his latest victim but she’s got an incentive he doesn’t know about: the $10,000 bonus promised to her if she can stick out three months with him. Chelsea might be little but she’s tough, having lived in the dog-eat-dog world of aspiring LA actors for almost 10 years as well as being the personal assistant to innumerable Hollywood assholes along the way. Bressler and his insults are nothing new to her.

But the passion they find together after finally giving into their attraction to each other is. The sex is great – no, better than great – but the emotional feelings that begin to develop just might be even better. If they can trust this potential love.

Long time fans of the Chinooks books will be happy to see a few familiar faces throughout the story but the book focuses mainly on Mark and Chelsea with a subplot for Chelsea’s twin sister, known to, and feared by, the team as the Mini Pit.

Even though Chelsea is short and Mark is brawny, I like the way that their relationship is balanced. I never got the feeling that he is overpowering her either physical or verbally. Chelsea more than holds her own here and proves her background of dealing with demanding people. And Mark, insulting as he can be, never slips over the edge into jerkwad territory. He does criticize Chelsea’s driving but then after surviving the kind of car accident he did, that’s reasonable. He comments on her fashion style but not on her body, despite what he thinks are her surgically enhanced breasts. Plus he makes sure that his former teammates behave themselves around her.

The physical attraction isn’t immediate, even though both admire each other’s bodies and they each manage to restrain themselves once desire starts kicking in. Chelsea is determined not to give into Mark sexually during work hours since this is something she’s never done. Even though it drives him nuts, Mark respects her boundaries. I appreciate that both can act professionally and not be reduced to puddles of drool.

Mark’s life was hockey and now that’s gone. There will be no coming back from these injuries and it does affect him. He does feel resentment at not being able to play for the Cup, he hates that his body won’t always obey him now and there is a dark pool of anger in him that takes a while to dissipate. All this felt natural and to be expected. His transition from player to “life after hockey” takes time and I’m glad you allowed us to see that time elapse.

Chelsea’s got a plan for life post-Mark and, just as she falls for him because he supports her, so did I. Hey, he doesn’t see anything wrong with her but he’s not her and if she wants this, then he’s onboard with it. The fact that Chelsea is able to reveal her secrets to Mark, and vice-versa, shows me how they are coming together.

Which makes the Big Misunderstanding all the harder to take. The only thing about it that keeps me from completely losing it is that Mark does have experience with woman who just want him for money. But, I still think his reaction is overreaction and it’s not like the money is coming from him, after all. Then the reconciliation happens on his sudden about-face which is fast enough to cause whiplash.

Up until the end, this book was cruising for me. And I still think that readers will enjoy most, if not all, of it. I love the hockey, I love most of the relationship, I love the big honkin’ ring Mark gives Chelsea but oh, that Big Mis. B

~Jayne

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This is a trade paperback published by NAL but pre-Agency pricing.

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I came across your book cleaning out my towering stash of review copies that needed sorting and sending out to the reviewers. I read the back and realized that it had a hockey hero. I love sports books and I set it aside to read. When I opened, it however, it started with some magical frou frou prologue that saw some grandmotherly type infusing magic into some yarn. The magic is used to bring couples together because why? Is it that humanity left to their own devices could never find love without the help of magic yarn? The yarn bit played no part in the story, merely book ended the book, appearing in the prologue and the last chapter.

But the yarn bit is emblematic of how the other distinguishing characteristics are treated: shallowly and without much thought. Grace Fisher, a daytime talk show host out of Cleveland, and Zack Hoolihan, the star goalie of the Cleveland hockey team, had a spectacular breakup after Grace found a girl in Zack’s hotel room during an away game. When Zack injures his knee and refuses to rehabilitate, only Grace can get him out of his doldrums and forced together, Grace must reexamine Zack’s claims of innocence.

Grace is fairly dumb. She goes to Zack’s room. He not only invites her in, but lifts her bodily into the room and then starts kissing her, assisting her in removing her clothes. As they move toward the bed, Grace notices a girl in lingerie propped up there. Her first thought isn’t that some groupie snuck in but that Zack cheated on her and what? just conveniently forgot the body of cheating evidence waiting for him on the bed? Strangely no one, not Grace, not her friends, or even Zack points out how ridiculous it is that he would have INVITED her in and proceeded to maneuver her toward the bed when he already had a chick there.

But then Zack is no brainiac:

Zack–formerly “Hot Legs”–Hoolihan sat in his wheelchair, left leg propped straight out in front of him, staring at the fifty-two-inch screen of the state-of-the-art plasma television taking up nearly every square inch of the far living room wall.

His friends had been so damn impressed when he’d bought the thing…Little did they know his main reason for replacing his perfectly good thirty-two-inch flat screen was because he’d needed something to hide the hole Grace had left.

First, a hockey player who has more money he can spend in three lifetimes (per the book) would not be amazed by a fifty two inch flat screen. Those can be bought for less than a grand. Neither would his professional hockey playing buddies be impressed by this. I don’t know many men that would be. Further, a fifty two inch screen that took up “nearly every square inch of the far living room wall” would mean that the living room was about 4 feet wide. I certainly hope that a professional athlete, making millions, would live in an apartment that had more space than a kindergartner laying down.

(What hockey trophy could Grace have stuck in the wall? I looked up a list of them and couldn’t find one that had an “ass end” that could hang out of the wall)

And you continued to make a big deal out his television:

“Give them a week and they’d be back, ready to watch the next big game on his fifty-two inch plasma…”

“He’d put up a gaint, flat-screen televeision–even bigger than his old one, which had been mammoth…”

But let’s move beyond the giant 52″ flat screen in the professional hockey player’s living room which is apparently the size of a single man tent to the hockey player himself. The plot here is that Zack refuses to start rehabilitating because he has been told he might not be able to play again. A star goalie of a professional hockey team is not going to be allowed to languish neither would his drive to compete, to be the best, allow him to do so. Someone from the team would be there, doing something. He probably would have a contractual obligation.

Zack had no motivation. He mentions nothing about his team. Doesn’t watch them on TV. Doesn’t miss the ice, the competition. Doesn’t even watch ESPN. He knits and watches soap operas.* Seriously what is the point of making Zack a professional athlete if you aren’t going to include ANYTHING about the sport at all. He doesn’t have any close teammates? No one from his team visits him in the 6 week span of this freaking book?

So maybe Zack is the Barry Bonds of his hockey team and no one likes or talks to him. Let’s move on to his injury. He has some problem with his knee but he “woke from surgery with a hip to toe cast.” What kind of knee problems involves a hip to toe cast? And if he has a hip to toe cast, he wouldn’t be a) in a wheelchair a month later and b) without a cast and c) having had missed three rehabilitation attempts already!   And this is hockey. A brutal sport were fights are an accepted part of the game.   A knee injury? That’s nothing to these guys.

Later in the book Zack agrees to do a photoshoot with Grace for her favorite underwear manufacturer, Inside Outs. Why would a daytime talk show host do underwear endorsements that could be worn on the outside? How does that fit the image? And you don’t think that Zack’s team would be incensed that he is off trotting to New York to get his picture taken when he’s supposed to be rehabbing his knee and preparing to get back in the game so that they can make the playoffs?

And why would a daytime talk show host like Grace be qualified to help him through rehabilitation like ensuring he is safely extracted from a shower or getting him dressed or moving him around (based on home exercises sent home by his orthopaedic surgeon??? This is a multi million dollar asset to a multi million dollar franchise!!!)

Oh details, right? What’s the point of details. This book isn’t about details, it’s about the love relationship between Grace and Zack. If it is not about the details, then why include them? Why make Zack a professional hockey player when none of his story revolves around actually being a hockey player. Why make Grace a daytime talk show host when none of her talk show hosting abilities are shown or discussed or part of the plot? They could be Zack, the plumber, and Grace, the rehab specialist. Frankly, they could be tchotchke one and tchotchke two for all the interest that they hold.

Half the time I wondered where the copyeditor was. Like the above reference to the tv size but also in lines like this that occur in a conversation about Grace liking soaps and maybe scoring a guest role on one of them:

“You angling for a daytime TV career now?” he asked.

She is a daytime TV talk show host. That is a daytime TV career. It’s not a primetime TV career. It’s not a radio career. It’s—I would :facepalm: here but my hand is sore from slapping my forehead so many times.   And Grace went all Carrie Underwood Before He Cheats on Zack, destroying his Hummer, throwing his clothes out of his apartment window, etc. etc.   Wouldn’t that have affected her talk show host status?   It was never addressed because I guess that isn’t important to the romance, right?

The book wasn’t even about knitting. Sure ol’ Zack secretly knitted and so did his two BFFs, conveniently heroes of the two previous books in this trilogy but the knitting could have been totally removed and this would have been the same book about the plumber and underwear fetishist.

I managed to read to the end. I don’t know how. But then it had this:

“The noise in the Quicken Loans Arena was deafening. The Rockets were ahead by six points, and fans were going crazy with every new shot of the puck.”

The average goals scored in a game is usually less than 6 but you have them ahead by six points and scoring more?   Maybe the yarn helped all of Zack’s teammates to have magical abilities?  I don’t know much about hockey, I’ll admit, but nothing in this story rang true about professional sports or professional athletes.   How was the romance? Who cares? I didn’t. I could not bring myself to care about underwear loving Grace and knitter Zack because it seemed like so little care was given to making the details of the story authentic.   D

Best regards,

Jane

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*Zack expresses extreme embarrassment over watching soaps, but why? Common knowledge that athletes watch soaps. Several have been guest actors. Famously Mark Schlereth, a football player, had a recurring role that he lobbied hard for. ESPN wrote an article about athletes love for the soaps.

**I am not linking to the author’s website because I want her to come read but as a service for the readers in case they want to check out her books.

***This is a Macmillan book and thus the ebook list price is $14.00.

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Emily Saunders was in Elk Crossing for “a wedding she didn’t want to attend with far too many of her family and friends asking nosy questions about her own continuing single status” when her hotel becomes infested with bed bugs. Another traveler at the hotel is Jonah Betts playing in his Old Timers Hockey League playoffs which is usually one of the highlights of his year.

The two get the choice of staying in the last hotel room complete with a leaky ceiling. Emily tries to throw out any number of ideas that can resolve the double booking problem including a sleeping bag on the floor.

Jonah was a pretty easy going guy, but this was going too far. He had his team to think. “I have an important day tomorrow,” he told her. “I need my sleep. You bed down on the lobby floor.”

She stalked right up to him, nose to his collarbone. Their lack of equality in the height department seemed to aggravate her even more. “I have an important day tomorrow, too.”

“I’m competing in a hockey tournament.”

“I’m a bridesmaid in a wedding.”

“My condolences.”

It’s not like Jonah doesn’t find her attractive. He does, but he’s more interested in trying to get a bed for the weekend than stirring up any chemistry between the two. He even goes so far as to promise that he won’t make a pass at Emily in hopes that she’ll agree to the simple solution of sharing the hotel room. Finally, realizing that it’s either sharing this one room with this stranger who proclaims he is a cop or going to stay with her relatives, Emily caves.

She turned back to him, he hair swinging in a silky curtain. “I carry mace. I’ll be sleeping with it under my pillow.”

“Hey, it’s got to be better to share a room with me than bedbugs.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Despite Jonah’s hockey games and Emily’s wedding duties, they end up spending quite a bit of time with each other. Jonah, with the clarity of an outsider, sees how Emily allows her family to take advantage of her. She’s single, after all, and in need of fixing with a surplus of time to do a dozen tasks from picking up the china to handwriting the place cards. Emily, despite her success as part owner of a wellness clinic, always feels diminished when she is home.

I liked that the attraction between Jonah and Emily built upon their enforced interaction. After watching Emily ineptly explain (lie) about why there is a man answering her hotel room phone, Jonah begins to notice little details about Emily. Emily begins to see Jonah as more than just a tall, attractive stranger but a man with a solidness about him; a good listener.

It’s a charming story. Emily and Jonah aren’t single because they have serious commitment issues but because they’ve never felt strong enough for someone to envision spending the rest of their lives with that other person. Because the two are relatively agnst free, the story contains a secondary romance and a suspense plot to fill out the length. The suspense plot was a little hokey but the jeopardy works to make both Emily and Jonah admit that the brevity of their acquaintance was no barrier to their love.

The secondary love story featuring Sadhu Ranjit whose nickname is the Indian Stallion for all the women who tend to drop their skirts when he’s in their presence and Emily’s friend Kirsten who is known for being rather weak willed when it comes to handsome men. Sadhu spends a little time with Kirsten and decides that he would like to get to know her better and refuses to sleep with Kirsten. It was amusing but very brief. I did notice that this was the second book in which a man of color played the leading role of a secondary romance in your Blaze books. I hope that we’ll get to see one of these guys play the main male protagonist.

I really enjoyed Emily and Jonah but it is a story that doesn’t have deep point of views but instead shines with good, sexy repartee, strong chemistry, and likeable characters. B-

Best regards

Jane

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Sadly, this was not
The read I was looking for.
Almost, but not quite.

Faith is ex-Playboy
Bunny and stripper who wed
A millionaire

Sound familiar?
Yep. It’s a romance spin of
Anna Nicole Smith.

But Faith is ‘special’.
Because she loved the geezer
Not just his money.

The geezer bumps off
And leaves Faith his hockey team.
(Sounds like SEP)

Team Captain Hero
You saw this coming a mile
away, didn’t you?

They bicker, smolder
And eventually land
in bed together

Predictable plot.
I’ll spare you all the rehash.
Carebear ending too.

My main problem? Faith.
Kept waiting for her to grow
A spine. Still waiting.

The story conflict?
‘Evil’ son of tycoon who
Bullies heroine.

Faith is also very
Nonchalant about stripping
But in a weird way.

Players would treat her
Like a ho, but she was fine
With it…why? Oh wait.

Her thought? She DESERVES
The lewd comments. She took off
her clothes for money.

She is fine with her
Sexuality…but dresses
Like a dowdy nun.

Her fogey husband
Wanted a lady, you see!
Not a stripper ho.

So to recap Faith:
No spine. Gold digger. Moral
Stripper. Nun Wardrobe.

Don’t get me started
On Layla, Faith’s ‘bad’ stripper
alter-ego. Ugh.

Your writing style? Cute.
Could have been a great story.
But I am unmoved.

C

This book can be purchased in mass market from an independent bookstore or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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I was excited to see another sports book in the Harlequin Blaze line.   My last encounter with a sports Blaze was Hard and Fast by Lisa Renee Jones and I enjoyed that book quite a bit.   Bodycheck is a hockey book and it suffered a bit in comparison to another hockey book with the same name by Deirdre Martin.   

The heroine, Hayden, read immature to me. While she was a kid, they moved around alot as her father spent his life coaching but they had a close relationship.   ”Her father had always shown an interest in her life. He’d listened while she babbled about her favorite artists, and taken her to countless museums over the years.”   After her mother’s death, her father was able to amass a fortune large enough to provide him with his dream, owning his own team.   Now she’s all pissed off because “she was an adult and he was busy with the team…and no longer seemed to care about making time to connect with her outside the hockey arena.”

I couldn’t summon any sympathy for her. Her dad was there for her while she was growing up and now that she’s an adult, he wants to pursue his dream? Why is that so wrong? Regardless, her father is in the midst of a nasty divorce and Hayden has returned to Chicago from a full time teaching position at Berkeley to reconnect with him. (This is an oddity for me as well: She’s a junior professor at Berkeley teaching art history and working toward her Ph.D.?? I’m not sure there is a thing such as a “junior” professor let alone one without a doctorate.)

I also didn’t understand what Hayden was doing in a hockey bar if she hates everything hockey? In most cities with a pro team, it’s easy to know which bars are frequented by the team. In Chicago, there had to be a few bars where she wouldn’t come within spitting distance of even a hockey picture. At least stay away from bars named “The Ice House” which was owned by two HOCKEY PLAYERS WHO PLAY FOR HER DAD.

Hayden decides that she needs a one night stand and at the urging of her girlfriend proceeds to pick up a hottie in the bar. Unbeknowst to Hayden, said hottie is Brody Croft, star forward for the Chicago Warriors. When Brody realizes that Hayden has no idea who he is and despite that she’s not the “leggy blonde” that he usually likes, he is ready to retire to Hayden’s hotel room for a little action.

It’s an explosive encounter that leaves Brody ready for more. For Hayden, though, the event was a one time thing and she refuses to give Brody her number. This rankles Brody as he can’t remember better sex and he wants to meet up again.   As fate (or the author machinations) would have it, the two meet after the next Warriors game which Hayden attends with her father.

Complicating the situation are rumors floating around that the evil stepmother is having an affair with one of the Warriors and that a couple of the Warriors took bribes from Hayden’s father to produce a loss. Worse, Hayden’s father is accused of placing substantial bets on those fixed games.

The relationship between Brody and Haydne moved at super sonic speed. Brody began to have internal narratives of possessiveness and emotional wonder after three encounters, two of which were sexual. The characters emoted on the page but I felt that the couple’s feelings lacked foundation for the agnst I was being pushed to buy.   

I was also disappointed at the sports angle of the book. You said in your letter to the reader that you pestered your hockey-playing buddies with questions like “What really goes on in the locker room?” and I wish that more of that was actually shown. Instead of pre game rituals, bonding, and the like which I find interesting because it’s a peek behind a curtain not generally known to the public and certainly not the female public, we merely get banter that could be from any other romance book between male characters. Further, everyone’s actions were in contravention to the team and the team concept and I do mean everyone, from the villains to the heroes.
  
The story speeds through the sex, the I love yous, the betrayals, and any attempts at creating nuance were lost in the rush. Perhaps content too ambitious for the size of the book but the from the overall arc to the details, I wasn’t convinced in either the relationship or the plot.

C-

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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Celebs faking love
Same plot as the SEP
But here I love it

Eric’s a player
Both in hockey and dating
His new team hates him

Monica? Soap star
In trouble — about to be
Upstaged by rival

Cure to their problems?
Fake romance for publicity
It’s a win for both.

What’s fake becomes real
They fall for each other fast
Will true love fix all?

What I liked about this:
Both enjoyed being celebs
No whiny bitching

Monica wants her
Picture taken, and so does
Eric. Feels HONEST.

Eric is a dork
And at times, sleazy – but I
Like the dual nature

Choosing between this
Book or WHAT I DID FOR LOVE?
No contest. B grade.

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

Chasing Stanley by Deirdre Martin

Another Blades book
This one features Eric’s twin
Jason as hero

The heroine here?
Jewish dog-walker and all
around stick-in-mud

Right away, I feel
these two are DOOMED for divorce.
Relationship fail.

He wants to party
She’s a homebody who loves
Animal Planet

He wants to party
(even more) but she is scared
To meet new people

He lies to her a
LOT. She can’t add him to her
Busy schedule. Sigh.

The only thing tying
These two together? Jason’s
Massive dog Stanley

I love Martin’s story
But I can’t get past mental
Roadblock for these two.

Still like your voice, tho
I am sticking around for
More Blades books. D

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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So I’ve bemoaning the economy this past week (so glad I’m not retiring for decades) and I got an email from a publicist declaring that in this depressing time I had to read a book about a doomed tsarina and it would sweep me away. My first response was, um no, during this time of sturm und dang, I need happiness, not doomed tsarinas. Thank god, I read romance and in particular, thank goodness I had to read this book. Admittedly, I didn’t have to. I wanted to.

Power Play tells the story of Eric Mitchell, the hotheaded, playboy twin brother of the hero in Chasing Stanley. The two are pro hockey players and Eric has just been traded to the NY Blades. The Blades aren’t having a great season and some look at Eric with resentment. One of the team favorites was traded to get Eric’s stick on the NY Blade ice and because the team is not winning, many of them don’t believe he was worth the loss.

Monica Geary is an established soap star on the top rated The Wild and the Free. A new, younger co-star is brought onto the show. This co-star in true All About Eve fashion is willing to do anything to be come a star right now, and that pretty much means muscling Monica out of the picture. Worried that her star is fading, Monica contacts her publicist and demands help. Help comes in the form of Eric Mitchell. Pretend the two of you are having an affair and the tabloids will eat it up.

So Monica and Eric enter into this tentative pact where Eric provides credibility to Monica as an attractive star, encouraging tabloid articles, and Monica makes Eric popular with his teammates who are addicts of The Wild and the Free.

Everyone in the league watched The Wild and the Free. Soaps were a favorite way for them to pass the time in hotel rooms when they were on the road, and they all watched when they were home, too, since the teams’ workout and weight rooms had TVs. Eric couldn’t count the times he’d been sweating his ass off on a cross trainer with his eyes glued to Monica Geary.

Jason had a faraway look in his eyes. “Remember that time Roxie’s fiance plunged into a volcano, but it turned out he didn’t really die, and he secretly came back to Garrett City, gaslighting Roxie for a while?”

“That was great,” Eric agreed. Talking about the show was getting him pumped.

“Or the time Roxie was reunited with the baby she’d given birth to in high school but didn’t know she had, because she’d been kicked in the head at the prom by a runaway horse and got amnesia?”

“Oh, man. The way Monica turned on the tears during that scene? You could hear guys sniffling all over the weight room that day. She’s a great actress.”

The funny thing is that Monica thinks Eric is a bit of no nothing jock who is a bad actor. His humungous ego takes a bit of beating at her hands. What I thought was great about this story was that Eric and Monica were definitely opposites whose weaknesses were offset by the others’ strengths. It was easy to see that these two not only belong together as a couple but would be strong far after the pages of the story closed. Both characters showed character growth. Eric learns that being in love makes you vulnerable and Monica learns that being vulnerable is the only way to be in love. The two of them deeply needed to be loved and at first, they sought it in different ways. Monica from her fans which means not taking risks and Eric by spreading his favors around in superficial ways.

And for any readers out there that think this is an unbelievable set up, it’s totally true that many, many pro sports players watch soap operas. This requires no suspension of disbelief. In fact, there is a sportscaster for ESPN named Mike Mark Schlereth. He had wanted to be a soap star and it became kind of a running joke until Guiding Light had him on as a guest star and now he has a recurring role. Pretty funny. I saw in your first sale letter that you had wrote for Soap Opera digest and it shows. This story reeks of authenticity.

By the way, while I know you have no say over your covers, if you did, I would ask never to use powder blue on the cover again because it looks like the guy is wearing his pajamas and it’s kind of hard to get “bad ass hockey player” when half dressed in powder blue. This book doesn’t topple my favorite Martin which was Body Check, but it rates right up there. It’s definitely a book that can take your mind off the dreary economy for a few hours. B

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

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Let me start off by saying there are a lot of issues going on here. Emily’s hectic life as a trauma doctor in the ER, Eric’s career as a high profile pro hockey player, Emily’s single motherhood and relationship with her 8 year old son, Robbie. Eric’s past as a brawler and loner. Emily’s past as an abused wife following her upbringing in a house ruled by her tyrannical father. Eric’s rough childhood with his single mom and his terrible first marriage with a gold-digging ho. And that’s all before Emily and Eric even meet and then have to work out their own relationship in this minefield of their pasts.

You handle all these fairly well. Some are more superficially relayed than others but I can tell you put a lot of time into researching all this and trying to make it realistic. However…I think there’s just too much stuff in this one book. Too many Traumatic Pasts, too many areas for misunderstandings – even if you do resolve a lot of these without letting them drag on past a few pages. There are just so many problems that have to be examined, dealt with and resolved for everyone to reach their HEA. By the end of the book, I was dragging and just wishing to finally get Eric and Emily together once and for all. I also felt they headed into marriage without discussing a lot of important issues such as the fate of the Saints and Eric’s playing career.

As for getting them together, it seems as if each 100 pages of the book would start with them warily eyeing each other, trying to work on a relationship, then something happens, and Emily pulls back leaving a bewildered Eric floundering as he tries to figure out where he went wrong. Rinse, repeat and start again. I got tired of Emily turning him away over and over. Eric has the patience of a saint – no pun on his team name intended – and is willing to try again a few more times than I believe any man would, even if he is fascinated by brainy women. He’s sweet, kind, loving, gentle, willing to give talks at schools, help out single mothers, drum up support for charities and is probably working on world peace in his spare time between hockey games. The man is simply too good to be true. But I did like how he shows his feelings for Emily by having her car repaired.

Emily is shown to be realistically dealing with being a single mom and a busy doctor. You do mention her grueling schedule, lack of sleep and having to be called back in to deal with an overflowing ER. I laughed my ass off at her comments about the bar brawlers. But actually, I think you did well in choosing her specialty since ER doctors don’t have rounds to make or regular patients to see. Thus she can schedule things to do and people to see during her off hours. I got frustrated with her apparent caving into her ex-husband’s demands not to see Eric even as she gives her battered ex-mother-in-law advice about fleeing her abusive marriage. But at least by the end of the book, Emily is standing on her own two feet and no longer cowed by Ryan.

At one point around midway in the story, I was wondering if we’d ever see Eric on the ice and as a hockey player. It took awhile but we finally got there. While the details might not be enough for a true hockey fanatic, they were good enough for someone who barely follows the sport. I think Eric’s – ahem – enthusiasm for mixing it up on the ice provides another realistic conflict in his relationship with Emily. But I don’t think that placing his team in the same city with another pro hockey team would get past hockey fans nor the outcome for the team after the season ends.

There’s a lot to like in this book, a lot that works. But there are enough problems I had and bookmarks I made while reading it to keep the overall grade at a C. For me, it would have worked better without quite so many issues to resolved. Oh, and maybe without the slightly sappy epilogue.

~Jayne

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo | All Romance eBooks

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At one point it seemed like that’s where it was headed,” [Underwood] says, ”but point blank, he is about football. I don’t know if it’s that I’m not quite his type or whatever, but I don’t think he’s at the point in his life where he would be willing to sacrifice football. He hated so much that people thought that he was paying more attention to me and that was causing him to not do well.”

I remember last season when the Cowboys played the Eagles and Underwood and Romo were caught by the cameras exchanging a pregame hug. Romo played abysmally and the sports guys were merciless the next day suggesting that if he spent less time playing with Carrie and more time playing with the football that perhaps the Cowboys chances for a better seed in the playoffs wouldn’t be in jeopardy.

How is this related to romance books? This whole thing reminded me of Deidre Martin’s book, Body Check, where the star hockey player, Ty Gallagher, broke up with his lover right before the playoffs because he was afraid he couldn’t give his all to his team. Of course, when the season was over and the team had won the Stanley Cup (naturally), he was ready for a relationship again. So maybe, Carrie, after Romo has won multiple Super Bowls, he’ll come to you and make this speech (just revise it slightly to fit the football aspect):

"In the past, I've never been able to maintain a relationship and make a run for the Cup. The personal stuff always interfered with the concentration I needed to win, or vice versa. I know there are guys who can balance both–" Kevin, for example–"but I've never been one of them. So I had to choose. I could either continue dedicating my life to hockey, or I could finish out my career on a high note and pursue a life with the woman of my dreams.”

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I’d enjoyed lots of your historicals and was curious to see how well you’d do with a contemporary. The answer is well enough that I’d love to see you write more of these. I enjoy sports romances and even though I didn’t know too much about ice hockey when I read this, a hockey mom friend of mine assured me that you got the details just right.

Cat Talbott never expected to inherit her half brother’s minor league hockey team. But she does know that she’s got to do something fast to turn things around or the whole franchise will go bust. She’s had a few offers to buy it but wants to give it at least one season to see if she can keep her brother’s dream going. And the man she hopes can help her turn the Wichita Warriors around is former player and friend of her brother, Logan Dupree.

Logan used to be a Warrior before he got called to the pros. Now, he spends his time drinking on his houseboat in Tampa and trying to forget the sudden injury that ended his pro career. He’s got enough money to ignore Cat’s offer of the coaching job but something makes him head out to Wichita to see just how bad her team really is. And somehow at the end of an evening, he finds himself the new head coach.

Cat isn’t some hot young heroine but actually an Older Woman who’s also a single mom and who tends to mother her team (or her “boys” as she calls them). She doesn’t know too much about hockey but she’s willing to learn and to give the team everything she’s got. Logan knows hockey but just needs to get Attila the Hen to let him do his coaching thing. And when they do decide to do something about the attraction between them (which isn’t over complicated with mental lusting), they really scorch the sheets.

The secondary characters are fun and there for a purpose while hockey neither takes over the story nor gets pushed too far in the background. There’s a great friendship thing going between Logan and a friend he ropes into helping him out and Cat’s relationship with her 12 year old son feels realistic and never like a sitcom. I’m not sure if you’re going to do any more stories based on any of the secondary characters but I’ll be waiting to buy any books in which you do. This turned out to be an impulse buy that was well worth it. B for Blindsided.

~Jayne

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You are a very uneven author for me. I loved your debut book, Body Check. Moderately disliked the second book, Fair Play, and did not finish the third, Total Rush. I honestly had written you off after Total Rush and wasn’t going to buy another book by you. After reading a review of Penalty Box, I looked the book up at my local library. It was in and I figured if it was a total wallbanger, I hadn’t risked much. After I finished the story, I ran to Barnes and Noble and bought my very own copy.

You, like Marianna Jameson, have a great voice for modern contemporary characters. Your dialogue exchanges were fresh and fun. The courting ritual seemed realistic. I could envision these characters in my head.

Katie Fischer was an unattractive, overlarge high school student who was the brunt of many jokes. She grew up, lost weight (through dieting and exercise), and went on to be a sociology professor. Katie comes home to Didsbury, CT, to write her book on pro athletes and to help her mother take care of Tuck. Tuck is Katie’s nephew. Tuck’s mom is in rehab, again. Paul Van Dorn (who some might remember from Fair Play) lives in Didsbury, CT, after too many sticks to the head forced him into early retirement. Paul owns a bar called The Penalty Box and goes there each night to relive his glory days. So Paul is shaped by his glorious past and Katie, by her painful past.

Their initial courtship is a riot. Paul is chagrined to find that the hot woman at the high school reunion was someone he mocked in high school. Katie is chagrined to find that she is attracted to Paul. Paul agrees to be interviewed by Katie, not because he is particularly interested in her book but because he’d like to get in her pants. But Paul realizes he likes Katie. She’s hot, smart, and fun to be around. Katie is attracted to Paul because he is hot, smart, and fun to be around. The problem is that Paul likes to live in his past and Katie is trying to escape it.

There are some LOL funny scenes in the book. The first one is the “first date” between Katie and Paul. Katie is very weight conscious. Paul decides to pack a picnic lunch full of very fattening things. He’s trying to be suave. Katie’s trying not to eat. She ends up drinking too much wine and after their first kiss, she throws up. It’s a hilarious scene that had me chuckling out loud.

I know that some will be disappointed by the lack of hawt sex, although there are sex scenes and nice ones at that. I also think that the resolution of the story was a bit rushed. It was a story that could have used an epilogue. One thing that I think hurts you and authors like you and Ms. Jameson is that these books could easily be marketed as chick lit instead of romance and you may do better in sales. This is a solidly character driven story and if the reader doesn’t like Katie or Paul, it isn’t going to work for them.

I enjoyed it and it looks like you are returning to fine form. Look forward to the next book. B+.

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

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