Scott Hunter, the star captain of the New York Admirals hockey team, has a secret. Several secrets, actually: he attributes his team’s recent string of victories to a blueberry smoothie from the Straw & Berry shop near his penthouse, he finds the young man who prepared the smoothie incredibly attractive, and he’s gay. Lucky charms aren’t a problem for a professional hockey player — athletes are notoriously superstitious — but being gay? That could be a deal breaker. Or, perhaps, a game changer?
I haven’t watched the blockbuster “Heated Rivalry” series yet, though I enjoyed seeing a bit of the “discourse” about it, largely from people who aren’t familiar with the tropes and expectations of romance fiction. It’s on my watch list, though, so I thought I should prepare for the experience by listening to the first book in Rachel Reid’s series, “Game Changer.”
I’ve become familiar with the romance genre over the last couple years, mostly through contemporary rom coms and mid-century Gothics, so I knew more or less what to expect from “Game Changer.” And it delivers on the genre’s expectations: a functional meet-cute, a push and pull in the relationship (Scott is terrified of coming out of the closet; Kip is afraid that he’s not good enough for a celebrity athlete), an angsty (though brief) breakup, and a grand romantic gesture as the climax, followed by a scene set a bit in the future of the book’s main action to cement the happily-ever-after ending and tie up a few loose ends. The surprises in a contemporary romance aren’t to be found in the beats and the plot; the pleasure is really in the characterization and the setting, and “Game Changer” delivers on those: Scott and Kip are fully realized characters with their own needs and motives, and many of the side characters — particularly Kip’s friend Elena and Scott’s teammate Carter — stand out as well.
What also stands out (and probably comes as no surprise to viewers of “Heated Rivalry,” from what I’ve gathered) is the frequent, enthusiastic, and detailed sex. I had just finished listening to “Swimming in the Dark” by Tomasz Jedrowski, and am currently reading Alice Winn’s “In Memoriam,” two historical gay romance (or romance-adjacent, at least) stories, and was surprised at first at how explicit and enthusiastic the sex in “Game Changer” was: Jedrowski and Winn are much more in line with a closed-door approach. But I don’t think “Game Changer” is significantly spicier than Ali Hazelwood, who shows up on my reading list pretty frequently. And as is the case with Hazelwood and some other romance authors on the spicy end of the spectrum whom I’ve read, Reid uses the sex to move the story forward and build Scott and Kip’s characters. A closed-door version of “Game Changer” might be possible (it would certainly be shorter …), but I don’t think it would be as rich and the characters wouldn’t be as realized; what happens in bed between Scott and Kip gives emotional heft to their relationship, and raises the stakes of the conflict at the book’s heart.
Unlike “Swimming in the Dark” and “In Memoriam,” “Game Changer” takes place in a world where being gay isn’t always a life-or-death proposition. But there are still risks in being out, and those risks are what drive the conflict between Scott and Kip: Scott fears that he’ll lose everything he’s struggled to gain in his hockey career if he comes out, and Kip is afraid of going back into the closet and being forced to live in the shadows to protect Scott’s reputation. It’s not quite the same level of risk faced in Poland in 1980 or England in 1914, but there’s still a danger in the very fact of Scott and Kip’s love that isn’t present in most of the contemporary romance novels I read.
A craft detail that drew my attention was that “Game Changer” is told in close third-person past tense; most of the contemporary romances I read are first-person past or present tense, either single point of view or alternating chapters between the main characters. The point of view is close enough that readers get inside the main characters’ heads, but not too intimately, and the story flows nicely with the focal character shifting between scenes within chapters rather than switching abruptly from voice to voice at a chapter break. There’s some loss of intimacy in the third-person vs. first-person point of view, but the gain in narrative flow may outweigh that.
In addition to being my first spicy gay romance book, “Game Changer” was also my first hockey romance book. (There’s a little hockey on the side in Hazelwood’s “Not in Love,” but it’s clearly not a hockey romance.) There’s a whole universe of hockey romance out there, and I’m quite sure I’m not ready to take on the nuances of the niche with anything approaching an informed opinion. And I suspect that “Game Changer” is a little outside the norm for the niche as well. I’ll probably queue up “Heated Rivalry” in the near future, but I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle the rest of the hockey romance world.
