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.
However–on a line-by-line craft level, this book is very dry and really not that good. The prose is terse and not particularly introspective, the internal voices of both point-of-view characters are basically the same, and there is really little to no figurative language (and if it does exist, it’s in the form of simple simile). This was really a fascinating discovery to me because I’m well aware of Reid’s fanfiction-writing bonafides, and I had expected some of that AO3 flavor to come across in her text, but as I read I just found myself wanting… more. There’s so much sex in this book but the descriptions were so mechanical that it was hard to find the smut scenes titillating at all. (Lowkey I feel like it’s a credit to Jacob Tierney’s directorial vision that the show is as well-done as it is!)
All this is not to say that the book is bad. I read it through and I enjoyed it, and like I said above there are certainly aspects of the book that deserve praise. But for those readers who are looking for prose with a little more flower to it, or a nice extended metaphor they can really sink their teeth into, I don’t think this is the book for you–I would point you to the aforementioned Icebreaker or, if you want sports other than hockey, might I suggest K.D. Casey’s Unwritten Rules series? I hear Diamond Ring is lovely this time of year.