Brooklyn Bruisers Series Books #5 and #6
Note: I had somehow thought that Sarina Bowen’s Brooklyn Bruisers series ended with book four. Anyway, I’m glad to pick it up again – here are two short(ish) reviews of books five and six.
Overnight Sensation by Sarina Bowen
The book opens with Brooklyn Bruiser player Jason Castro at a bar with teammates. Also there is Heidi Jo Pepper, a team intern with whom Jason has shared a mutual lust since the previous season. Heidi gets drunk and comes on strong; Jason is tempted but ultimately decides Heidi is too drunk to consent. Unfortunately, the two are snapped in a compromising position outside Jason’s apartment, and the photo gets printed in the tabloids. Jason quickly discovers two things: Heidi is not even old enough to legally drink – she’s 20 – and she’s the NHL commissioner’s daughter.
Jason is 25 and scrambling for a roster spot in the pre-season. He had success in the previous hockey season, but he doesn’t yet feel assured enough in his career to be confident that he’ll stay in the majors for good. Jason comes from a happy family but suffered a life-altering tragedy when he was 18 – his high school girlfriend was killed in a car accident. As a result Jason has vowed Never to Love Again, and all of his “relationships” are of the one-night-only variety. I didn’t love Jason – he was both underdeveloped and a bit of a clichéd character.
Heidi, on the other hand, interested and engaged me. Blond, bubbly and feisty – but in a good way – Heidi fights against the expectations of her parents, especially her father. She’s been raised to be a good Southern girl, but she’s recently decided to leave Bryn Mawr without graduating. Heidi really wants to get a job working for the Brooklyn Bruisers, but so far she’s just a low-paid intern.
The fallout from Jason and Heidi’s photo debacle leads to Heidi moving out of her daddy’s penthouse apartment in Manhattan and onto the couch in the apartment Jason shares with his teammate Silas, an arrangement that is intended to be temporary. Jason has decided he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Heidi, whereas Heidi really wants the opportunity to be a bad girl for once – with Jason.
Again, I really liked Heidi much more than Jason. She ends up, for reasons I totally didn’t understand, being forced to take various intended-to-be-humbling jobs for the Bruisers as part of her internship – selling hot dogs, operating the Zamboni, filling in for the mascot. This is directed by her father both as a punishment for leaving school and to motivate her to return. Since I understood her internship to be with the team, I didn’t get why the commissioner got to decide what her duties were. I thought Heidi’s father was a controlling jerk; Heidi had more patience with him than I did.
I admired Heidi for being upbeat, determined and competent. I really like a competent heroine; I think I’ve read too many whose incompetence is played for laughs. She’s a hard worker who quickly goes from having “no marketable skills” to running a concierge business for Bruisers players, delivering groceries and dry cleaning, etc.
The relationship between Jason and Heidi unfolds fairly predictably, though I was a little surprised by Jason’s behavior in the middle of the book. It was clearly meant to set up the inevitable breakup, which seems to be a feature of 99% of the hockey romances I’ve read. I’m trying to think if it’s just contemporary romances in general, but I think hockey romances – at least the ones I’ve read – follow a formula pretty closely. And I mostly like that formula! I’m not complaining, just observing. (Okay, maybe grumbling a bit when the protagonist that I like less acts like a jerk towards the protagonist I like more.)
My grade for Overnight Sensation is between a B+ and a B.
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Superfan by Sarina Bowen
The previous book in the series, Overnight Sensation, had established Silas Kelly, roommate to that book’s hero, as a Certified Nice Guy. Silas is what we used to call a beta hero (do they still use those terms in romance?) – dependable, sweet, non-promiscuous. It was also established in that book that he was a fan of a pop singer named Delilah Spark, a fact that earned him some ribbing from his teammates. (At the time I thought maybe it was because Delilah’s music was too pop for the rock-and-rap loving athletes, but I think she’s supposed to have a strong singer-songwriter vibe, though in the real world she’d probably have to fit into the pop box to have the sort of success she seems to have had.)
What no one knows is that Silas isn’t just some anonymous superfan – he and Delilah have a history. Several years back, when Delilah’s career was just getting started, they met in Silas’s small seaside hometown in California. She was there for a music festival, and Silas was bartendering, waiting for a call from a minor league hockey team after being previously released. When the two meet at his bar, they have an instant connection, and over a couple of days form a bond. But when he stands her up on a date to take her surfing, the connection is broken. Delilah, wary of men, never gave Silas her phone number, and Silas’s plans to have a co-worker let her know that he couldn’t meet her on the beach – he had a sudden offer from a team and had to get on a plane RIGHT THEN – go awry.
Years later, Silas is a successful goalie for the Brooklyn Bruisers, and Delilah is a star. They meet over Twitter when Delilah attends a hockey game, and she agrees to a date with him, not knowing that Silas is her “Ralph” (he wore that nametag at the bar – it was an inside joke from his school days). When they do get together at her suite in a New York hotel, the connection is still there, and after clearing up some misunderstandings, they fall into bed.
Delilah’s life is kind of a mess – she has broken up with her agent/boyfriend Brett, a grade-A asshole who happens to have a bad history with Silas going back to their high school days. Brett won’t release her second album unless she signs on for another with him, something Delilah does not want to do. She’s come to realize how much control Brett had over her life and how many things she let him take care of, leaving her feeling incapable of managing things on her own.
Delilah grew up in foster care, something I wish had been given a bit more detail on the page. The ways in which she is shaped by her experiences come through, but I felt like we got more of Silas’s less-interesting backstory. Delilah is tough and wary, but she’s also…not very self-sufficient? She got involved with Brett against her best instincts because he took care of her and there was part of her that, understandably, wanted to be taken care of. Now she’s trying to stand on her own two feet but it’s not easy.
This is a mostly very sweet and conflict-free romance. Silas and Delilah have a magical interlude on a tropical island while attending Nate and Becca’s (from Brooklynaire) wedding. The conflict is external – how will the two manage to reconcile their high-pressure, opposite coast lives?
When Silas acts dumb late in the book rather than telling Delilah what was going on, I nearly threw the book across the room, except the book was on my phone and I’m not that dumb. But Silas was! It felt very unnecessary and out of step with the plot to date. Luckily the conflict didn’t last long, but it annoyed me and may have brought my grade down a smidge. Superfan was a high B+ for me.
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The problem I had with OVERNIGHT SENSATION (I haven’t read SUPERFAN) is there was a lot of “pretty blonde white girl” entitlement in it. Like we’re supposed to feel sorry for Heidi that she has to work two minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet and live in a crappy apartment in a bad part of town—like, I don’t know, 99.9% of the planet’s population who aren’t blessed with wealthy parents and a trust fund. I actually liked Jason way more than Heidi.
Delilah Sparks is referred to very briefly in Sarah Mayberry’s SWEETHEART (which is set in the same world as Bowen’s TRUE NORTH and includes characters from that series and some from the Brooklyn Bruisers). I loved SWEETHEART and highly recommend it. And now I know Delilah’s backstory, I think I have to give SUPERFAN a try!
I read Overnight Sensation some time ago and had similar thoughts to you, @Jennie. I still look forward to reading Superfan even though this series doesn’t resonate with me as much as some of her earlier works. My favorite book and novella by Sarina Bowen are from her Ivy Years series: The Year We Fell Down and Blonde Date
I’ve only read Overnight Sensation and like you I loved Heidi Jo and found Jason kind of generic. After reading the review I now remember enjoying Heidi’s adventures at work and her determination to succeed, but I cannot recall anything about the relationship or how the characters interact. Which is why I haven’t read many Sarina Bowen books lately; they’re all well written with a few interesting scenarios but they don’t resonate emotionally like her earlier books did.
Re. Overnight Sensation:
This sounds like a plot hole and for her dad to be able to exert pressure on the team to do that to her makes me respect the team leadership a lot less. Is Nate still the owner at this point in the series?
More than that, though, I’ve seen this in a lot of books. The heroines are humiliated to a degree that never happens to the heroes, either for humor or to gain the heroines reader sympathy. Not that I want it to happen to heroes either. I’m not a fan of the humiliation trope.
On the upside, I think that competent heroines are a lot more commonplace than they used to be. I can’t remember the last time I read about an incompetent heroine. I don’t miss them.
Re. Superfan, how does Delilah not recognize Silas as the “Ralph” who stood her up years earlier if they had such a great connection when they first met?
I’ve only read seven of the author’s books but my favorite (by far) was The Understatement of the Year. It was as far as I recall the only one that made me cry. And I mean sob. After that it’s probably The Year We Fell Down despite the ableist nonsense. There was a sweet gentleness to that story that I really liked. The Year We Hid Away was pretty good and so was her YA, The Accidentals. The others didn’t work that well for me.
I have heard her True North series is really good, has anyone here read those?
@DiscoDollyDeb: I never felt like Heidi acted entitled – she seemed willing to work, and was fairly accepting, in theory, of living in a dump. Jason was the one who wouldn’t hear of it (which felt a little paternal to me, but I figured it was supposed to be a sign that he was coming to care for her). The other thing was, she was only 20, which is SO young to me at this point in my life.
I’ve never read Sarah Mayberry, I don’t think – I should give her a try.
@Kareni: I read the Ivy Years series long enough ago that it’s hard for me to compare. I do really enjoy college-set NA romances, but I also like the slightly different focus of characters who are a bit older.
What I really like about the contemporary series that I read these days (which all seem to be hockey-related, and I’m not even a big hockey fan), is the dependability and consistency. I know what I’m getting.
@oceanjasper: Yeah, I get that. I read them for something specific – a certain consistent voice and rhythm to the story. In that way they are kind of comfort reads, I guess.
@Janine: Yes, Nate is still the owner. I guess I should reread to see if there’s any good reason for why the commissioner gets to decide what tasks an intern will take on, but I don’t remember any in the first read. It would make more sense if it were a different owner and you figured the team was just capitulating to the commissioner, but since the owner is one of the heroes of the series, that doesn’t seem quite right.
I think I have mixed feelings about humiliation tropes – I don’t like them per se, but I can find them satisfying emotionally the same way angst satisfies me (though less than it used to). The hero (usually) finding out that he was wrong about the heroine (usually) is something that still works for me viscerally, even if I have issues with it in my head.
I agree that competent heroines are much more the norm these days.
Delilah doesn’t actually see Silas until he shows up at the hotel – she pulls up pictures of him online but only sees pictures with his goalie mask on. I guess it sort of defies credibility, but she actually has canceled the date by the time he shows up (he gets her location from Delilah’s publicist) – so I think it’s just that she’s not that invested.
I will have to check out The Accidentals. I think I read all of her Ivy Years books except for the M/M. I read the first True North book – Bittersweet – and gave it an A-. I should pick back up with that series!
@Jennie: I think if it was another owner caving to the commissioner it would still seem contrived—and fishy, too, because if they’re doing the commissioner favors, what favors is the commissioner doing for them? But having it happen while Nate, a hero, is in charge of the team makes it even more irritating.
Can you explain what’s emotionally satisfying to you about the humiliation trope? I’m not asking you to defend it, it’s more that I want to to understand because it is one whose appeal I’ve never gotten (also because I recently finished a much-lauded book where the main character is constantly humiliated in the first third of the novel; I saw a review that described this section as gently comical but to me it was disturbing and icky and I didn’t see any humor in it).
The one character (hero usually) realizing how wrong they were wrong about the other works for me viscerally as well, and I understand why. My satisfaction there is rooted all the way back in childhood, when some injustice or perceived injustice my parents had committed against me had me fantasizing about running away from home and almost dying in a ditch somewhere, whereupon (once I was missing and they were anxious for me) they would realize how wrong they’d been. They would then sit at my hospital bedside begging me to get better and forgive them while they wept tears of remorse or some other such claptrap.
I mean, I know how ridiculous that sounds (part of me knew it even then) but it’s still a powerful fantasy. We’ve all been wronged and misjudged in our lives and we want to be vindicated; for the person who misjudged to realize how wrong they were and be confronted with the consequences of their misperception is a powerful, satisfying emotional fantasy. It epitomizes the “emotionally just ending” that was the second component that made up the second half (the first half being “a central love story”) of the RWA definition of a genre romance before that organization went belly up for well-deserved reasons.
But I don’t get the engine that powers of the humiliation fantasy, how readers derive satisfaction from it. I’d love to hear more about that (anyone else feel welcome to chime in too).
I think you would like The Accidentals. My favorite Bowen is the Ivy Years M/M book. You should read it. I think you would like it even if M/M isn’t usually your thing. It wasn’t for me at the time I read that book and I still loved it.
@Jennie: I didn’t think the sense of entitlement came from Heidi herself but from the characters around her and especially from the authorial voice. I felt that as readers we were expected to feel that Heidi should have it better than minimum-wage jobs and a crappy apartment because of the very fact that she is a pretty blonde girl who has a lot of pep and optimism.
@DiscoDollyDeb:I can see that. Heidi did get coddled a bit by Jason and Silas, at least.
@Janine: It’s basically just as you say – I’m not getting anything out of the humiliation itself, but out of the moment when the hero and/or everyone realizes how wrong they were.
In the case of this book, the “humiliation” is quite mild, mostly because Heidi doesn’t feel that humiliated by most of her assignments. But it’s both satisfying to see her rise above expectations, and to have other characters see it.
@Janine, I’ve read a number of the True North series and enjoyed them all… but not as much as the two works I listed above.
@Jennie: To go off on a tangent (since I don’t think this applies to this book, I didn’t get that sense from your review), I think the reason I usually don’t get that kind of satisfaction from the humiliation trope is because I don’t trust people who don’t see humiliation as a bad / wrong thing to begin with. So when they realize they were wrong to heap humiliation (thinking here of some of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ books) on the heroine or to believe she had earned it or that it would teach her a lesson or that it defines her, it’s not enough to make me respect them or view them as decent people. Obviously the degree to which I feel that way depends on the particular plot and how it’s handled. And there have been books where I’ve enjoyed it. Maybe hits too close to home (not home in the present day, thank goodness) and so I’m sensitive to it.
@Kareni: Thank you, that’s helpful information. Do you like that series more or less than the Brooklyn Hitter books?
@Janine: I was thinking of the SEP books too – the ones I’ve read definitely take the humiliation trope too far, and it becomes unpleasant to read. I’m thinking of the one with the disgraced preacher’s wife as being especially bad.
@Janine: my two-cents, fwiw: I think the True North books (especially STEADFAST and KEEPSAKE) are better on the whole than the Brooklyn Bruisers series (and there is definitely some crossover between the two series, particularly in BOUNTIFUL). Also, although each book is technically a stand-alone, I would recommend reading the True North books in order because characters do recur. I’d recommend the same if you decide to read the Brooklyn Bruisers, although one of those books—PIPE DREAMS—had such an awful hero (he starts up a relationship with the heroine while he’s still married to another woman and then he dumps the heroine and goes back to his wife—it’s an utter mess) that I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly be the hero and that the heroine was going to eventually see the light and find a man who deserved her. I basically rage-read that one. And I thought BROOKLYNAIRE could have been a much better story—after I read it, I coined the term “BROOKLYNAIRE Syndrome” for those times when we’ve waited so long in a series for a particular couple’s story that when we finally get it, we’ve imagined and shipped the story so much that the actual thing is a letdown.
@Janine, like @DDD, I liked the True North books somewhat more than the Brooklyn Bruisers books. Be aware that I haven’t read them all.
@DiscoDollyDeb: Thanks, I appreciate that input! :) I remember reading Jennie’s review of Pipe Dreams and thinking that it sounded pretty bad. And LOL re Brooklynaire Syndrome! I haven’t read that but the book that immediately jumped to mind when I read that description was The Legend of Lyon Redmond by Julie Anne Long. Although I think that would have read like a bad book even if I hadn’t read the preceding ones.
@Kareni: Thanks! I should check those out.
@Jennie – Piping up randomly to say that you should give Understatement of the Year a try. It’s the M/M book in the Ivy League series, and one of the best things Sarina Bowen has written imo. I find her really hit and miss – sometimes the characters and scenarios are vivid (e.g. The Year We Fell Down, The Year We Hid Away), other times they have a paint-by-numbers feel. In Understatement of the Year, a few of the supporting characters are a bit on the nose but the two central characters are so gorgeous and compelling. I think I read somewhere that they came to her fully formed, which she says never happens. It really shows in the writing.
@Gab: I’ve heard that before about Understatement of the Year – I think Janine recommended it, probably among others. I’m not big on m/m but I should give it a try at some point.
@Gab: Yes!!! Understatement of the Year is her best book (of the ones I’ve read).
@Jennie: You totally should. I’m not a big reader of m/m either (I prefer f/f these days because a I miss having a female central character when there isn’t one in a book) but I loved it.