REVIEW: Game On by Kelly Jamieson

JennieB- Reviews / Book ReviewsChicago Aces / Contemporary romance / hockey / Series8 Comments

Dear Ms. Jamieson:

This is the ninth book in the Aces Hockey series and the fourth that I’ve read. It starts with a premise that I don’t love. Cam Brickley sees Olivia Lockwood in a bar and ends up in a bet with his teammates: he’ll date her for two months and not fall in love. On the one hand, it’s not the worst “hero ends up pursuing heroine because of a bet” premise I’ve read. He’s just betting that he won’t fall in love, after all, not that he can get her into bed or something sleazy like that. But the fact is he has ulterior motives for dating Olivia, other than the fact that he likes her (and he does like her; there is an immediate and strong mutual attraction between them). It felt squicky to me.

Olivia has a bit of an ulterior motive herself, which I guess is supposed to balance things out, though her motive and approach are somewhat nobler than Cam’s. Olivia runs a charity dedicated to encouraging physical activity in children through running. When she realizes who Cam is, it occurs to her that he would be a great spokesperson for her charity, which has stagnated a bit. Their donations have dropped off and they recently lost out on a grant they’d applied for. Olivia really wants to make the charity successful – not only is it her passion project, but she has issues with her high-achieving family that make it important to her to be successful at something.

Olivia and Cam go on a date and are both struck with food poisoning. This sets up a mildly humorous bit where their first couple of dates are kind of disasters. After the food poisoning incident, on the next date a chair breaks under Cam at a restaurant, and then Olivia (who’s a bit of a klutz) spills a glass of water all over him. It was sort of cute (and unusual) to see two attractive, wealthy and successful people go through these mishaps.

Eventually, they get it right, and before you know it, they’re sleeping together. To Cam’s credit, he does try to tell Olivia about the bet before they first have sex, but she brushes him off. The bet storyline isn’t drawn out too long, though, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, since it was distasteful to me, it was for the best that it wasn’t belabored. On the other hand, had it been, it might have provided a bit more dramatic tension and angst, both of which I felt the story lacked.

I really liked Olivia. I liked her insecurity, which felt very real and relatable. She’s beautiful and smart and likable, but she’s never felt good enough, and it’s affected her relationships (somewhat unrealistically, it appears all her previous beaus were only into her for her money or connections – her family owns a big conglomerate called Lockwood Industries). She’s a bit neurotic – for instance, she’s scared of dogs, even Cam’s dog Magnum, who is described as a golden lab mix. I realize I can’t relate to the fear of dogs, but the idea of someone being scared of a LABRADOR made me laugh.

Cam I liked less. He was okay, I guess. He was somewhat crude – on their first date he makes a joke about how he’d like Olivia’s hands on his balls. I guess I expect slightly more PG-13 behavior on a first date.  He jokes (?) that Magnum is named after the condom brand. I will cop to being a little prissy, so YMMV. To be fair, Olivia seems to find his crudity charming.

In general Cam just seemed very basic. He’s Canadian; he grew up with sisters. His family doesn’t have any stated dysfunction. He’s a very typical romance hero who “doesn’t date” but essentially has one-night stands or maybe goes out a few times with a woman (presumably just for sex).

I’ve gotten less and less patient with that type of hero over the years. I may never have been very fond of them in the first place, actually. I spent a lot of my early romance reading career reading historicals with “rake” heroes, and while they sometimes (often?) bugged me, at least it made sense that those men hadn’t had “relationships” in the contemporary sense. But the contemporary hero who gets to a certain age and has never had a relationship, and doesn’t have any trauma or a backstory to explain it annoys me. It either feels like a device to have a hero who doesn’t have any baggage, and/or it’s supposed to be romantic that a hero never knows what love is until he meets the heroine.

Very late in the book there is a mention of a high school girlfriend who took their breakup hard, and even later Cam’s father posits a reason for Cam’s unwillingness to do relationships. But still, in real life if I were a 30-year-old woman and met a guy of a similar age who’d never had a real adult relationship I’d think the guy was likely a stunted man-baby and I’d run in the other direction.

(Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)

Anyway, the story unfolds pretty predictably – the ulterior motives give way to feelings, but reasons (albeit, paper-thin ones) keep the two from thinking their relationship can be anything but short-term.

I do like that the author obviously has a real love for the city of Chicago and includes details about the city in the series. There were a couple of times in this book where some of the “facts about Chicago” felt a bit shoehorned in, but all in all, I appreciate an author creating a real sense of place.

Overall, though, Game On was pretty blah for me. Readable enough, as most competently written contemporaries are, but lacking in any real dramatic heft. The denouement felt like it was pretty much the same as in the three previous books I’ve read in the series (I’ll spoiler-tag it since it comes so late in the book but it won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has read more than two romance novels):

I’m giving Game On a B-. I’ll probably still read the next book in the series.

Best,

Jennie

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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