REVIEW: Consider Me by Becka Mack
B+ Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended ReadsCanada / Contemporary / hockey / twitter rec23 Comments
Dear Becka Mack,
This book was recommended to me by @AGrandRomance on Twitter so first up – thank you Kate for the rec. I bought Consider Me and dived in almost straight away.
Carter Beckett is the captain of the Vancouver Vipers hockey team. He’s hot, talented and has the world at his fingertips. He’s not interested in a relationship. He has hook ups – in fact the book begins just as one such hook up comes to an end. Women throw themselves at him and he doesn’t mind saying yes but he makes it clear he doesn’t do sleepovers and he never gives out his number. Some might slip him their digits but he’ll never call. Carter’s about to meet the woman who’s going to change all that. OMG the anticipation was just delicious.
Olivia Parker is a high school physical education teacher and best friends with Cara who is living with Carter’s teammate and bestie, Emmett. Emmett and Cara have been dating for a year and living together for most of it. (It was kind of love at first sight for them. They’re the kind of couple you expect to find there’s already been a book about. As far as I can tell, there isn’t.) They’ve assiduously kept Olivia away from Carter for all that time. Emmett and Cara both have warned Carter there would be dire consequences if he messed with Olivia. He therefore has no intention of going there. Olivia, for her part, is definitely not interested.
“I’m not a mission, nor am I looking to be the next girl pictured in the news getting down and dirty with Captain Syphilis over there.”
But at Cara’s birthday bash, Carter sees a (very) short curvy brunette and he’s is a complete goner. And then she shuts him down. More than once. (Ha!)
Carter Beckett is the definition of sexy. He’s arrogance dressed in expensive clothing, smooth, corded muscles, and a charming smile, and quite possibly the face of chlamydia; I can’t be certain. I’m sure he takes precautions, but the man gets around like a globe-trotter.
There’s definite chemistry but Olivia is not the usual type of girl Carter is pictured with. She doesn’t have legs for miles. She’s not blonde. She’s not a cheerleader or a model. It’s not so much that she has self-esteem issues – but the kind of media spotlight she’d been if she were with Carter would feature endless unflattering comparisons and her ego is not up for it. Also, she’s the kind of girl who only has sex with someone she cares about. If there’s no feeling there she won’t bother. Catching feelings for Carter seems like a bad idea. He’s never had a girlfriend. He’s never had more than a one night stand. He’s a smooth talker but what in his past would cause her to believe he’s after more than just one thing from her?
Carter is persistent in fun but not stalkery ways. He doesn’t cross the line but he makes it clear that he hasn’t given up. He can and does take no for an answer. He doesn’t recognise it at first (how could he?) but from the moment he saw her he was hers. The first part of the book is him chasing her, her rebuffing him, them being thrown together by friends who, for reasons, suddenly think it’s a great idea they get together and him realising just who she is to him. And once he’s in, he’s all in. Be still my heart.
“Do me a favor,” Emmett says as we head into the bar in the lobby. It’s rammed and rowdy and I kinda don’t want to be here. “Remember how it looks to be surrounded by girls who throw themselves at you. Doing nothing isn’t enough. You have to actively do anything but nothing.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means it’s easy for someone to snap a picture of you standing next to a girl who’s touching your arm and headline it ‘Carter Beckett: Cheating Already.’ Be aware, that’s all. You have someone else to think about now. A picture like that would embarrass Olivia.”
“Right.” I honestly couldn’t feel more dense right now. How is it that I need to have this explained to me at twenty-seven? Either way, I’m thankful for his warning, because the second we sit, a girl throws herself in my lap.
I’m not sure my reaction is the best. I throw my hands in the air and scream, accidentally shoving her off my lap and to the ground when I rocket to my feet and yell out, “I have a girlfriend!”
There are plenty more laughs in the book, mostly at Carter’s expense (or about Olivia’s lack of height) and the sex is off the charts hot. Hot.
There’s more to Carter than just being a womaniser. He is devoted to those he’s close to. Once someone is in his circle they’re there forever. He has a close relationship with an elderly blind man, Hank, who he met the night of his father’s funeral seven years earlier. (They have a pseudo-father/son relationship in some ways but a lot of it is straight up friendship.) He adores his mother and sister. He’s still grieving his father. He loves dogs. And when he meets Olivia he very quickly loves her.
Everyone knows by now that I’m a hero-centric reader so of course I’m going to focus on Carter. He’s the larger than life character here anyway. But Olivia is not merely a cipher or a foil for him. She’s got her own things going on and she’s kickass. While some of the things her senior boys say to her seemed wildly inappropriate, when she puts them in their place she does it with style and hard as concrete. To paraphrase Shakespeare, she’s short but she’s mighty. She is fierce and I enjoyed how she held her own against Carter and with Carter as the book progressed.
If I were to describe this book in one word it would be “indulgent”. I probably need to unpack that a bit though because it might not sound like the compliment it is. Sometimes I just want to eat a whole packet of Maltesers (for those of you who don’t know what they are, insert your favourite snack food/chocolate here). They’re morish and yummy and impossible to eat just one of (I dare you). Indulgent – if not terribly nutritious. Consider Me was like that. I wanted to keep reading, finding excuses to do it and staying up too late – “just a few more pages” before closing my reader. It hit most all of my feel good buttons and inspired me to go and buy your other book Love You Wild which will hopefully give me the same vibe. And I started stalking visiting your website eager for news of what’s next and the lure of bonus material (alas I haven’t seen any yet. Sadness. First offering just arrived. Yay!)
To those who enjoyed books like The Deal by Elle Kennedy and The Hook Up by Kristen Callihan (both of which I loved and have re-read many times) – this book might just be right up your alley. There’s also something of that excitement experienced by those who fell down the Kristen Ashley rabbit hole back when Motorcycle Man first came out – more the feel of the read rather than anything in the style or characters really – I wouldn’t draw a direct line between Ashley and yourself in terms of style. Yours is distinctly your own.
I gather that you got your start in fan fiction and/or on Wattpad and there’s a sense here of that feels-based episodic story common to those platforms.
Consider Me is not perfect. There are a few typos (also, is “I dunno” really spelled “I donno” in Canada?). It’s probably too long. Indulgent in another way I guess. There were portions of the ending that didn’t quite gel and felt to me they were there for plot purposes rather than being representative of, by then, well-established characters. Olivia is about 5’1″ and Carter is 6’4″ so there is a lot (too much) about their height difference and how “tiny” she is. There’s a section of the book where a teammate gets married and there’s a little too much in there about not-Olivia and Carter. Emmett and Cara’s change of heart about supporting the relationship came out of the blue for reasons which weren’t clear. I suspect it was more about moving the plot forward than anything else. (I didn’t mind. I’ve certainly gone with worse before.)
Carter’s love of Oreos and junk food and all the pizza he and his teammates eat didn’t fit super well for me with professional athletes. Isn’t there a team nutritionist tearing their hair out about this?? I actually looked up the highest paid player in the NHL and was surprised to learn that the money they make is way less than NFL or NBA stars. I thought hockey was bigger than that? Then again, everything I know about (ice) hockey I learned from romance novels. My virtual shelves have more hockey romances than any other sport combined, with NFL second, so in my head hockey is bigger than it apparently really is. Huh.
It did fall down at the end somewhat. I’ll hide this under a spoiler tag as it discusses – albeit vaguely – things very late in the book so it might be mildly spoilerish.
Spoiler: Show
It’s also a book which is all about the feels. Id reading at its height.For some that’s a plus for others, maybe not so much.
Perhaps Carter won’t be a hero everyone will love. He has touches of Mal from Kylie Scott’s Play (my favourite character of the series) and I know Mal is too much, too overwhelming for some. For me, he was a delight (and so is Carter). I love a hero in pursuit. I love a hero who is gone for all money right from the start and has to prove himself to his chosen partner and do some chasing – especially if that’s a new thing for him. Ding ding ding.
There’s also plenty of friend banter – things that were and still are highlights for me in the Off Campus, Game On and Stage Dive series’ – Carter’s teammates are well drawn and often hilarious, as is Hank. There’s a scene with Carter and his mother which cracked me up – like, literally, I was hooting with laughter. Olivia’s friendship with Cara is solid, ride-or-die and also funny, and I loved Olivia’s interactions with her brother and his wife and children too. There’s a big cast who feel well-realised without overtaking the book (except for that wedding). Like it was designed specifically to please me, there’s mostly lots and lots and lots of Carter and Olivia. I wallowed unashamedly.
Grade: B+
Regards,
Kaetrin
(Consider Me is currently only available at Amazon)
Since this is available on KU, I will be reading. You mentioned it may be too long and at 616 pages, I would agree. I’m old, so the sweet spot for a romance is 350 pages for me.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a website that edited out the unnecessary pages in KU books. It could be…read to page 185 now keep turning until 270 turn another 50 pages, etc. This way the author would get the required page turns and the reader wouldn’t have to read all the boring stuff that should have been edited out. Imagine how much more enjoyable a few Zapata books would be.
What a lovely review. I’m finishing the last book or two of a series and then I’ll read this.
@Jenreads, respectfully disagree about the length of Mariana Zapata’s books. If they were shorter they would be completely different stories.
LML, You’re right! Zapata was a bad example. Kulti may be a long book but it reads like one 200 pages shorter.
@Kaetrin: I grew up in England and Maltesers (along with Cadbury Flake bars) were fixtures of my childhood. Thanks for a quick trip down memory lane.
@JenReads: 600 pages seems very long for a basic romance, but so many books seem to end at around the 85%-90% mark and the remaining pages are “bonus peeks” at other books. I generally scroll past them so that I can get to the Author’s Afterword or Acknowledgments because I like to read those too and they seem to be placed after all the extra stuff.
Thanks for your enthusiastic review, @Kaetrin. I’ve downloaded a sample to see what I think.
I didn’t read the book on a kindle. For me, the book was about 450 pages not 600+. In any event it is a long book. I wasn’t bored at all but it could have been tightened up a bit.
Hockey is nowhere near as popular as American football or basketball are in the US. According to Wikipedia, in terms of television viewership NFL football, NBA basketball, MLB baseball, March Madness (also basketball, but at the college level) and NASCAR are all garner higher ratings than ice hockey. In terms of participation, basketball, baseball, soccer, and football are all more popular. In a survey conducted in 2018, 37% of Americans named football as their favorite sport, 11% named basketball, 9% named baseball, 7% chose soccer, and only 4% said that hockey was their favorite sport.
Hockey fares a bit better with regard to annual attendance in national league games, coming in third, but at an average NHL game there are fewer fans in attendance than at an average game of football, baseball, soccer or basketball (though it comes in very close to basketball in average game attendance). Football, basketball, and soccer are sponsored at the high school level at all 51 of the 51 states, baseball in 49 of them, but ice hockey in just 20.
By almost all metrics, hockey, though not a piddly sport, also isn’t the powerhouse sport that the romance industry would have you believe it is. I have pondered hockey’s outsize presence in the genre and concluded that there’s a component of racism and classism there. A 2014 article in the Atlantic indicates that hockey’s fanbase is the wealthiest and whitest of the fan bases of the team sports I have listed. I can’t find articles on diversity among the athletes in national leagues that cover the MLS (soccer), but the NHL is less diverse than the NBA, NFL and even the MLB. At one time, football dominated in contemporary romances, but there are a lot more Black players in the sport now than there were then. If an author shies away from diversity, it’s a lot easier to write hockey romances than to face questions about why all your football player heroes are white.
Moving on the classist issue, hockey is also not the most accessible of sports to the poor since training requires access to an ice rink as well as a fair amount of gear relative to basketball, soccer and baseball. I suspect this very inaccessibility and exclusivity is part of what makes hockey appealing to so many romance authors, in the same way the billionaire heroes appeal.
There’s more to this than just that, of course. I think another part of it may be that hockey, like American football, is a very violent sport, and violence has a certain entertainment value (however uncomfortable that may be to think about, it’s true for many of us). Also, I think the viewers and fans of hockey are on average young relative to those of baseball, which is also a very white sport. And I do believe that some of the authors genuinely love hockey. Some hockey romances have done well and gotten a lot of attention, so of course more authors have jumped on the bandwagon for that reason too. Things get trendy in any medium, and hockey romances are a trend.
I don’t want to suggest that it’s all racism (I don’t believe that), and I certainly don’t fault readers for enjoying or reading the books. I have enjoyed some a lot (I’m counting the days until our review of The Long Game runs), even though I have no interest whatsoever in hockey outside of my romance reading. But nevertheless I think there are some questions to be asked there.
@Janine: I think hockey’s prevalence in romance (outsized to its popularity–at least in the U.S.) is because it’s not a sport that a lot of Americans are very familiar with. If an author makes mistakes regarding any aspect of the game, it’s not likely that too many American readers will realize that. I’m a huge baseball game and have a working knowledge of football (acquired during 30-plus years of marriage to my football-fan husband); if I read a baseball or a football romance, I’m much more likely to identify errors about how the game is played and that can take me right out of the story. In contrast, I know very little about hockey, so any mistakes an author makes about the game will go right over my head and I can stay focused on the central story and sort of “hand wave” the details of the game itself.
@Janine:
I’ve had similar thoughts about the popularity of hockey in romance. I’d also add that being a high profile sport but not as popular as other major sports may make it easier to fictionalize – readers might not be as familiar with it, so there’s more room for creative license without choosing a more niche sport that doesn’t appeal to as many readers.
(I for one would love a niche sports anthology and I can’t believe nobody has done one as an Olympic tie-in).
I do want to note that while MLB doesn’t have many Black players, around 30% are from Latin America, which is a far greater proportion than what you’ll find in the NFL/NBA/NHL and possibly more than MLS has, too.
@Janine: Janine, I love your deep dive into this topic! Agree with you 100% on the classism/racism issues in hockey. In terms of popularity though, I bet you those stats would be reversed if you conducted the survey in Canada. I have no stats to back this up but I bet the only sport to rival hockey here would be soccer. When my kids were little, the questions I got from other parents were, Are you putting your son in hockey? Are you signing your kids up for soccer? In Edmonton, every neighbourhood has a hockey rink, although only a few kids I knew of actually played in some kind of league. Rachel Reid (HEATED RIVALRY, etc.) is Canadian; I don’t know about the other authors of hockey romance.
@Eliza: I agree that Canadian readers will likely have a different response to hockey romances than American readers because of the prevalence of hockey in the Canadian sports world. I know Rachel Reid and Taylor Fitzpatrick (who wrote one of my all-time favorite hockey love stories—although I don’t think it qualifies as a true “romance”—THROWN OFF THE ICE) are Canadian. I’m not sure about some of the other popular hockey romance writers like Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn.
@Janine, what an interesting analysis. Thank you.
@DiscoDollyDeb: That’s an excellent point and probably true as well; since the population of the US is bigger than that of Canada, American readership probably is too. However I think that as with many things, there is more than one factor at work here.
@Rose: Yes, I agree that ease of using creative license is almost certainly a factor as well.
The niche sport anthology is a great idea. There have been some books about figure skaters, Kathleen Gilles Seidel wrote about snowboarders, and of course there are boxing books, and some about soccer. But I can’t think of any book about skiing and considering that among winter sports it is pretty popular, that’s really surprising. Same with track.
Great point about the MLB. When I said it was white I was thinking mainly of its fans in the US. The article in the Atlantic listed it as having the second whitest fan base of the other popular team sports I listed (I don’t count NASCAR as a team sport, but it was the only whiter one than hockey; I was shocked that even the fandom of golf is more diverse). Here’s the article if you (or any of you) are interested:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/which-sports-have-the-whitest-richest-oldest-fans/283626/
@Eliza: Yes, that’s a big difference between Canada and the US and you have a good point about the authors. I didn’t think of it but you are right. Elle Kennedy is Canadian too I believe. Sarina Bowen is not, but she does live in New England which is cold and also very white.
@LML: You’re welcome.
@Rose: I found this article in the New York Times with a graph of diversity stats for athletes in professional sports leagues in the US. The graph is at the top of the page so you can see it even if you can’t get behind their portal. It turns out the MLB (baseball, for those who don’t know) is more diverse than you thought—40% of the athletes are people of color. But that’s still less diverse than the NBA, the WNBA, the NFL, and yes, the MLS, which apparently has 60% athletes of color (surprising, given the number of white parents enrolling their kids in soccer). The NHL isn’t even listed, which says something IMO. Here’s the graph if you want to see the full stats (they have some on coaches and managers also).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-graph-diversity-in-professional-sports.html
@Janine: Sarina Bowen’s Gravity trilogy has a skier and several snowboarders. Miranda Kenneally’s YA books feature characters involved in all sorts of sports – football, softball, distance running, horse racing – though most are not at an elite level.
Personally I’d like something more obscure, like archery or open-water swimming or Nordic combined.
Re MLB, my guess is that if you look at the fanbase globally instead of just the US, it’ll be much more diverse. Baseball is really popular in Japan and South Korea, too. But obviously fans from there, or from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic or Curacao, aren’t going to be attending many MLB games or watching a US broadcast.
@Janine: The 30% estimate was for Latin American players specifically, because that’s the most sizable non-white group in MLB. That doesn’t include Black Americans or the smaller number of East Asian players, plus I’ve no idea how the players from Curacao are counted. But adding all those should get you to around 40%. To what extent this is similar to the population of the US, I’ve no idea.
Readers looking for more obscure sports may want to check out Tamsen Parker: FIRE ON THE ICE (f/f) features short-track speed skating, LOVE ON THE TRACKS (m/f) features luge, and SEDUCTION ON THE SLOPES (m/m) has downhill skiing. I haven’t read any of these but Parker generally writes compelling stories.
Back to CONSIDER ME – Kaetrin, you wrote an excellent review. I read the sample yesterday but I don’t think this book is for me. I was so dismayed by Carter’s treatment of his puck bunny in chapter one that I don’t think I’d be able to warm up to him. At least I hadn’t by the end of the (fairly lengthy) sample. I’ll take your word for it that this is a wonderful book.
As regards less common sports, Avery Cockburn has a series featuring curling.
@DDD – “I think hockey’s prevalence in romance (outsized to its popularity–at least in the U.S.) is because it’s not a sport that a lot of Americans are very familiar with.”
I think that’s why I like hockey romances. I don’t have any interest in sports but they’re so prevalent in the US that I could hardly have avoided seeing some on TV and what I’ve seen has been boring. So hockey has the advantage of being exotic to me. Also, since sports are so big here, there tends to be a lot of news coverage if players are arrested for abuse/violence or colleges prioritize sports over everything. There’s not much room for romanticizing.
@Eliza: Carter isn’t covered in “good hero points” at the start of the book for sure.
Regarding popularity of sport and the representation of hockey in romance, the author of this book is Canadian so I expect that played into it as well. There’s not a great deal of actual hockey in this book though. There are reference to games and playoffs and the Stanley Cup but pretty much the only on-page game play is when Olivia is watching the game.
@Rose: Regarding the Miranda Keneally books, I don’t think of YA novels as romances, even when the romance is what the plot centers on. The primary focus of YA thematically speaking is coming of age rather than finding true love. That makes the priorities of the authors different. The desirability of a central male character doesn’t always have to be stressed to the same degree in a YA (it’s not always a big part of what the reader will zero in on), and even when it does, it’s usually not framed in a “marriage material” / “eligible bachelor” way, so how popular a sport played by a main character who is also an athlete is, or how much money that character earns from their sporting career is isn’t as crucial either, unless that’s a primary focus of the plot.
An archery romance might be cool but I have zero interest in a novel-length romance focused on long-distance swimming (and swimming was my favorite sport when I was a kid!) or nordic combined. I barely remember what nordic combined is, LOL. However if it was an anthology of short stories or novellas and the author(s) were good, I would read them.
I knew baseball was popular in East Asia and Latin America. I apologize for misreading what you said about the player diversity stats. I should have framed my first comment on this topic more clearly; I was responding to Kaetrin’s comment about the earnings of the highest-paid NHL player versus players in other sports, so I was thinking in terms of the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and NHL. Therefore my focus was on ratings and game attendance in the US, which is where these leagues make the lion’s share of their profits (these profits being a big factor in what kind of salaries athletes can demand).
@Eliza: I have a hard time thinking about reading Tamsen Parker books since she wrote about Orthodox Jewish characters experimenting with BDSM, which is terrible representation IMO. I keep thinking I should give her a shot since I’ve heard good things and her books sound good, but somehow that always gets in my way.
@MaryK: I think you’re right; ice hockey does have some exoticism in the US that contributes to its romantic glamour (a term I have a hard time defining but that I think makes a difference to my reading experiences, particularly in contemporary romance).
@Kareni: I read this YA book years ago that focused on curling. https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/b-reviews/review-pride-prejudice-and-curling-rocks-by-andrea-brokaw/
@Jayne, I just read the review you linked; that does sound charming!