I went into this completely blind. I saw the blurb said “for fans of Icebreaker” and just picked it up. Frankly, the fact that they marketed this book to be anywhere near the realm of Icebreaker is audacity at its finest. 

This book read terribly. There were so many chunks of different plot points that felt disjointed and didn’t read seamlessly. The conversations were corny and cringy, the steamy scenes felt very awkward and mostly, the writing itself wasn’t great. 

For a book that’s about Mister Hockey, we don’t actually get to see him in his element. We don’t get to experience the “Captain Jed West” that everyone keeps talking about. He doesn’t seem to go to work, honestly. There’s also stuff about his brother that never really seems to be resolved; a plot point that is used to keep the story going but shoeboxed to the end.

While I appreciated the attempt to talk about difficult stuff like acceptance, body positivity, the writing and plot were so clunky that the message didn’t come across.

The book is extremely short, reads like a novella but still ultimately too clunky for my liking.