Mister Hockey

• Author: Lia Riley
• Genre: Romance
• Publication Date: January 2, 2024
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Series: Hellions Angels #1

Thank you to libro.fm for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am providing my honest opinion voluntarily.

For fans of Icebreaker —sparks fly between a hockey player with a dirty mouth and an awkward bookworm in this spicy hockey romance. Jed West is Mr. Hockey, the captain of the NHL’s latest winning team and the hottest player on the ice—at least, according to Breezy Angel, who’s been drooling over Jed at games for years. He plays a starring role in her most toe-curling fantasies. But dirty dreams don’t come true, right? Everything changes when Jed saunters through the doors of Breezy’s library as a last-minute special guest for a summer reading event. Their chemistry is immediate and hot enough to thaw an entire rink in record time. But things grow complicated when Breezy decides to hide the fact that she’s Jed’s biggest fan. After all, her feelings for him are genuine, so who has to know? She’s not the only one with secrets, though, and Jed’s could change the course of his career forever. Can this hockey hotshot and quirky bookworm find the courage to be honest with each other or will their love story be over before it can truly begin?

I’ve never read a sports romance before, and I have to be honest: I’m not the biggest fan of sports ball. But … if I had to choose one sport, I’d have to pick hockey, because it’s the sport that I know the most about. Two of my nephews played it, and I went to as many of their games as I could. So choosing a book called Mister Hockey written by someone with the same name as me (even if she spells it differently) seemed like a no-brainer.

I enjoyed the dual narrators on this audiobook, one for the MMC and another for the FMC, allowing for more of an immersive experience while reading. Both Alexander Cendese and Vanessa Edwin did a fantastic job voicing their characters and any others that had dialogue in their chapters, and I’m a total sucker for romance novels with dual POVs. So we were off to a good start.

Riley went with another of my personal favorites to see in a romance novel, a plus-sized FMC. Breezy is described as having “generous curves” more than once, and there are multiple descriptive terms used by the MMC to describe her body that had such positive connotations. However, my issues came up when the FMC describes her own body. There’s such internalized fatphobia that she is constantly putting her body down, and insulting her shape and various parts of her body. And I get that this is the message that society tells us all the time, but I don’t read this type of book to get a dose of reality—I read them to escape reality. So hearing this message reinforced repeatedly was not enjoyable at all, and took me out of the story. It occurred mostly at the beginning, and had me considering a DNF, but since it was a relatively short read, I decided to just push through.

I’m so glad that I did, because it got better. There’s instant attraction between the two MCs, probably because Jed is ridiculously (conventionally) attractive, and Breezy is exactly Jed’s type. But … Breezy is a huge fan of his, but lies about it at their first meeting, which ends in disaster. The connection between the two characters develops pretty quickly, but to be fair, it’s a short book. I liked the banter between the two of them and the connection that develops over the course of the story. It doesn’t hurt that both Breezy and Jed have pretty awesome personalities that I wouldn’t mind hanging out with. While Jed is a hockey player, Breezy is a total book nerd, and I adored how much her bookishness pervaded her personality. 

Overall, this was a cute and fluffy romance with a conflict that wasn’t excessively dramatic. I thought it was done well, and there was so much humor in the story that I caught myself laughing out loud quite a few times. This read went by quick, and it’s one that I can recommend, as long as you can make it past the fatphobia in the beginning of the book. Other than that, it’s a pretty enjoyable story with a fast-developing romance that offers a bit of spice but not too much.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase through my links.