Archives for December 2025

In a twist that shocks no one, I’m sure, I too have been caught up in the hype around the Crave television adaptation of Heated Rivalry. The show is fantastic, but I’m not particularly patient about waiting for new episodes, so I decided to cheat and get ahead a little by reading the source material while slogging through the week between episodes 4 and 5. I don’t know much about hockey, but I read and enjoyed A.L. Graziadei’s Icebreaker earlier in the year, which I felt would provide me with sufficient foundation–and besides, I had a suspicion that the rules and mechanics of hockey wouldn’t be, shall we say, the primary focus of the novel.

I do want to start by giving Rachel Reid her flowers: the characters she’s created are compelling, and the emotional beats of the story were more than enough to draw me in. Even though the story progresses through nearly a decade of time in the span of less than 400 pages, there’s enough genuine chemistry between the protagonists to keep me feeling connected to the story even with long spans of time in between their encounters. And because the world of hockey is, as I understand it, still an extremely homophobic and primarily white institution, I do think it’s great that the cast of characters is relatively diverse and that readers who might not see themselves reflected on real hockey television might at least see themselves reflected here.

Listen. Here’s the thing, okay? Objectively this book series is insane. Like we have a fictionalized ultra-violent version of lacrosse that somehow has a robust NCAA network of teams as well as an Olympic team despite having been invented like 18 years ago. We have so much mafia violence it makes Goodfellas look like Saturday morning cartoons. The justice system doesn’t work that way, psychiatric medications don’t work that way, so much in these books just straight up doesn’t work that way… and yet!!!

I will say that in comparison to the original All For the Game trilogy, which started its self-publication journey in 2013 and lowkey you can tell, this second series—which focuses on fallen Raven Jean Moreau and his transfer into the care of sunshiney USC team captain Jeremy Knox—is considerably less grimdark. It’s also pretty clear to me that Nora has taken a lot of the feedback on the original series (there aren’t that many women, for example, and most of them aren’t treated super well by the narrative; there is a lot of language in the prose that’s reflective of the times) and is actively working to correct those things in these new books. I personally really appreciate that, and I think that attention is what makes The Sunshine Court so much more enjoyable to me than the original trilogy (and that’s saying something because I really love the original series).