There’s just something about ice skating stories. Calinda Valerio and Ramirez Diaz-Tan met a decade earlier, when they were both regulars at the same Manila rink, she for figure skating, he for hockey. Calinda was twenty, but her parents demanded she not date, lest dating, or marriage, or pregnancy, interfere with her skating career (a…
When Thrown Off the Ice first appeared in my GoodReads feed, the cover caught my eye, but I kept scrolling. When it kept appearing, day after day, I finally clicked through and read the blurb. It didn’t tell me much: Mike knew he was making a mistake when he let the rookie climb into bed…
I have a strange relationship with hockey romances. I love the idea of them – I like contact sports, and alpha males, and contemporary romance – but I’ve struggled to find any that really ring my bell. Kelly Jamieson’s Win Big, with its abysmal dialogue, hot sex, and a hero with the strangest observational tendencies…
Fans of New Adult sporty romances set on college campuses likely have writers like Elle Kennedy on their auto-buy lists and I’m definitely one of them. With her current series, Briar U, she’s been profiling some good guy hockey players, young men with an eye for the ladies as much as the game. Now it’s…
Want some fun, awesomely written rivals-to-lovers romance? Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn serve up some delicious hockey-based sexual tension with Goalie Interference, a story where competition moves from the ice to the bedroom to the battlefield of the heart. Emmitt Armstrong wakes up from a Cabo San Lucas–based tequila coma to some bad news –…
Sidelined is a warm-hearted big city romance with a small town feeling that is, for the majority of its running time, a readable football romance that has an easygoing core and a witty sense of self. But the introduction of a poorly-written disabled character and the disappointing ending mean I can’t give it more than…
Heated Rivalry is the second book in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series set in the world of professional hockey. I haven’t read book one (Game Changer), but although characters from that book are mentioned in this one, it works perfectly well as a standalone. Heated Rivalry is a kind-of-but-not-quite enemies-to-lovers story that takes place across…
I saw Love on the Run mentioned at the #RomBkLove hashtag on Twitter and it piqued my interest. When I saw that I already had it in my TBR along with a couple of other books from Zuri Day, I immediately decided that it would be my pick for contemporary romance month at the TBR…
It’s not often that an author is truly able to redeem an unlikable character. When I started Kickin’ It, I was immediately put off by the overly feisty heroine, Parker Speedman. But in the end, while I didn’t love the book overall, I was surprised to find that I’d come to like her. The story…
My first thought as I closed this book was “Dammit, why isn’t there more!” which should go a long way to explaining why this second book from Ms. Martin is a DIK from me. As far as I’m concerned, here are the criteria for you to buy this immediately. Do you like contemporary romance? Do…