This is a spoiler-free review!
I downloaded this forever ago on a Stuff Your Kindle Day, and since I have been riding on the hockey romances, I figured I should jump to another one and keep the ball rolling. When Declan needs to turn his image around in order to sing for a better hockey team, his PR team decides a fake relationship is exactly what he needs in order to win the public favor and get back in good graces with the hockey world. Hattie, an up-and-coming cookbook author, just so happens to spark a connection with Declan, and falls into a situationship turned fake relationship in order for them to both get what they want - what could possibly go wrong?
This book is riddled with pop culture references, which is not my cup of tea - considering it was published in 2023, I would have hoped that the writing style of 2013 would have been long abandoned. I understand some millennials have an attachment to Harry Potter, but I am begging them to let it go!! Hattie's self confidence seems to appear and then disappear throughout the book - I could not get a read on her, considering she seemed shy in the beginning but then suddenly became super confident after meeting Declan. And with a friend like Brooke, I was surprised to see that she was not as outgoing as I expected her to be. I would have loved to see a smoother transition of her self-confidence throughout the book, it would have enhanced her characterization.
To be honest, Declan's characterization was the best by far - he has a much clearer journey compared to the rest of the characters, and I enjoyed his perspective chapters a lot more than I enjoyed Hattie's chapters. He was easier to be sympathetic towards, and that may be because of how much more of a backstory we got of Declan's and his current internal struggles. Brooke and Jax were fun side characters, but I will say that Brooke annoyed me beyond belief - it felt as though she would just abandon Hattie at any chance she got to go and try to hook up with a hockey player, and Hattie was usually just left sitting by herself or going home. Jax was a decent comedic relief when the story needed one, but he was not in the book enough for me to actually form a solid opinion on his character.
The writing is... something. I truly believe this should have gone through another round of editing or two before being published - at times, the writing felt choppy and unfinished. You can somewhat tell where the author wanted to take the story, and then it would either cut off completely or change perspectives. This was more so for a light and quick read - it reads like every other TikTok blurb book you see about hockey romances, and while I am a sucker for fake relationships, it never truly felt as though their relationship was fake, so the stakes felt low and the miscommunication was not my favorite aspect.
If you are also riding the hockey romance train, this could be a palette cleanser in between series or just a quick read to throw you into the genre before you embark into a planned reading schedule. The concept for this book was there, but I would not reach for it again unless the author acquired some serious editors to go through it. The story moves quickly, but at the cost of characterization and to be quite honest, plot. The author sacrifices a lot of pages in place of smut, and while it was decent, it was not something that had such a wow factor that I could forgive the plot being put on the back burner.
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