Game Changer by Rachel ReidMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Did I like the romance plot?
No.
Did I enjoy the sex scenes?
Also no.
Am I nevertheless rating this 5 stars?
Absolutely yes!
Finally, I have found a hockey book series in which the protagonists actually play hockey!
Scott and Kip have your stereotypically cringey insta-love meet-cute, and their relationship progresses equally unrealistically--I think Scott beat out all the lesbians with how soon he brought out the metaphorical U-Haul. I also LOATHE the voices that this audiobook’s narrator chose for each guy; he literally should have switched them? Or just chosen ANYTHING besides cartoon “Brooklyn” meat-head who can’t pronounce r’s or t’s. I had to have a genuine serious talk with myself by the end of chapter 2 to see if I could even make it through this audiobook as-is. I only managed by pretending that these were real people, because obviously you can’t hate someone’s actual real voice. Or, you know, you can, but only silently inside your own head and outside your head you just have to deal with it. Also, Kip clearly has a very big speech impediment and it would be very wrong to hate him for it.
I also hated that even though our rich and famous the man, the myth, the legend Scott Hunter insta-fell in love with a poor, it’s clear that Kip is a virtuous poor--and therefore deserving of love from a rich-and-famous--because he’s too proud to let Scott pay for things. Like, bro, we get it. You’re not a whore, and your love can’t be bought. But also, you work in a smoothie shop? And your boyfriend is a millionaire? Just let him pay off your student loans, which are a predatory scam designed to keep you poor, anyway!
Other than Kip’s moaning about not wanting to take Scott’s money, Kip has such a bad time for the majority of this book that I felt terrible for him. Scott Hunter was an asshole for almost this entire book. He took that beautiful social butterfly of a man and turned him into his dirty little secret, isolating him up inside his empty penthouse, making him feel uncomfortable talking to his own parents, much less all his friends, because he felt he had to maintain his boyfriend’s closet, and generally making him more miserable for the majority of the book than when he was still living at home with his parents and working a dead-end low-wage job. That scene in which his best friend, the only person Scott has allowed him to tell about their relationship, says she’s moving across the country, and when Kip tries to tell Scott about it he couldn’t be less interested or more irritated, got me in the gut. Poor Kip! What Scott should have done was leave that beautiful man alone, get a bunch of therapy from a licensed professional, come out properly, and then ask Kip out when he could finally deserve him. But some guys just have all the luck, and I guess it turned out fine in the end.
My first favorite thing about this book is how Scott actually plays hockey in it, and we get some mid-game drama, a couple of fights, gossip about players on other teams, trade deadline stress, dealing with the rookies, etc., but my second favorite thing about this book is, as in Heated Rivalry (which I read out of order), the real Big Bad is 1) toxic masculinity, closely followed by 2) the NHL as a whole (see: toxic masculinity). And I do think that Reid’s version of how the first openly gay player in the NHL comes out is just about the only realistic scenario. She starts with a remarkably empathetic and close-knit team, as evidenced by the removal of the team’s big jerk early on, and she makes the closeted gay player the team’s long-time and very beloved captain. He also has to be one of the best players in the league, and closer to retirement than not so he’s got a legacy of greatness and a terrific reputation. And although Hunter planned to come out at the end of the season regardless, it’s very important that it happens right after winning the Stanley Cup, just so nobody can pretend like Hunter’s sexuality affects his game or the team’s success. If any real NHL player actually wants to come out--and I really, really hope some NHL players will!--circumstances close to that would also be their best-case scenario.
I like Heated Rivalry so much better than this book that I’m wondering if it’s the fact that this is a reskinned Captain America fanfic that’s throwing it off. (Yes, it is. YES, IT IS!). Like, you can have some amazing writing in fanfic (see: All the Young Dudes), but it’s very, very different in most cases from a “proper” book, and every book I’ve read knowing that it’s a reskinned fanfic I think has suffered from it. In this specific case, there's some backstory that it's easy to gloss over in a Captain America fic, because we already know that Steve's mother died when he was young, for instance, so you don't really need to build all the ways that affects him into his character yourself, because your readers already know it's there. But when you reskin the brief paragraph in which Steve Rogers mentions his mother's death into one in which Scott Hunter does, you've got the same backstory beat, but you DON'T automatically get the same understanding of all the ways that affects him, because Scott Hunter's backstory isn't part of the cultural canon the way Steve Roger's is. I think Reid could have done a lot more to make Scott Hunter a more sympathetic and realistic character by showing how his isolation and lack of family has led to some of his problematics behaviors towards Kip, especially, but I wonder if he was always Steve Rogers in her head, and so she didn't notice that she needed to. In contrast, I think she handled Ilya's emotionally complicated backstory in Heated Rivalry very adeptly, and I can even see some places where I think she's foreshadowing some more things for Ilya and Shane in her later books, so she's very capable of writing a full character when she's not having to wade through a whole other IP to get there.
@hillarynorwood #heatedrivalry #gamechanger #kipandscott ♬ original sound - BGuy
I also hated that even though our rich and famous the man, the myth, the legend Scott Hunter insta-fell in love with a poor, it’s clear that Kip is a virtuous poor--and therefore deserving of love from a rich-and-famous--because he’s too proud to let Scott pay for things. Like, bro, we get it. You’re not a whore, and your love can’t be bought. But also, you work in a smoothie shop? And your boyfriend is a millionaire? Just let him pay off your student loans, which are a predatory scam designed to keep you poor, anyway!
Other than Kip’s moaning about not wanting to take Scott’s money, Kip has such a bad time for the majority of this book that I felt terrible for him. Scott Hunter was an asshole for almost this entire book. He took that beautiful social butterfly of a man and turned him into his dirty little secret, isolating him up inside his empty penthouse, making him feel uncomfortable talking to his own parents, much less all his friends, because he felt he had to maintain his boyfriend’s closet, and generally making him more miserable for the majority of the book than when he was still living at home with his parents and working a dead-end low-wage job. That scene in which his best friend, the only person Scott has allowed him to tell about their relationship, says she’s moving across the country, and when Kip tries to tell Scott about it he couldn’t be less interested or more irritated, got me in the gut. Poor Kip! What Scott should have done was leave that beautiful man alone, get a bunch of therapy from a licensed professional, come out properly, and then ask Kip out when he could finally deserve him. But some guys just have all the luck, and I guess it turned out fine in the end.
My first favorite thing about this book is how Scott actually plays hockey in it, and we get some mid-game drama, a couple of fights, gossip about players on other teams, trade deadline stress, dealing with the rookies, etc., but my second favorite thing about this book is, as in Heated Rivalry (which I read out of order), the real Big Bad is 1) toxic masculinity, closely followed by 2) the NHL as a whole (see: toxic masculinity). And I do think that Reid’s version of how the first openly gay player in the NHL comes out is just about the only realistic scenario. She starts with a remarkably empathetic and close-knit team, as evidenced by the removal of the team’s big jerk early on, and she makes the closeted gay player the team’s long-time and very beloved captain. He also has to be one of the best players in the league, and closer to retirement than not so he’s got a legacy of greatness and a terrific reputation. And although Hunter planned to come out at the end of the season regardless, it’s very important that it happens right after winning the Stanley Cup, just so nobody can pretend like Hunter’s sexuality affects his game or the team’s success. If any real NHL player actually wants to come out--and I really, really hope some NHL players will!--circumstances close to that would also be their best-case scenario.
I like Heated Rivalry so much better than this book that I’m wondering if it’s the fact that this is a reskinned Captain America fanfic that’s throwing it off. (Yes, it is. YES, IT IS!). Like, you can have some amazing writing in fanfic (see: All the Young Dudes), but it’s very, very different in most cases from a “proper” book, and every book I’ve read knowing that it’s a reskinned fanfic I think has suffered from it. In this specific case, there's some backstory that it's easy to gloss over in a Captain America fic, because we already know that Steve's mother died when he was young, for instance, so you don't really need to build all the ways that affects him into his character yourself, because your readers already know it's there. But when you reskin the brief paragraph in which Steve Rogers mentions his mother's death into one in which Scott Hunter does, you've got the same backstory beat, but you DON'T automatically get the same understanding of all the ways that affects him, because Scott Hunter's backstory isn't part of the cultural canon the way Steve Roger's is. I think Reid could have done a lot more to make Scott Hunter a more sympathetic and realistic character by showing how his isolation and lack of family has led to some of his problematics behaviors towards Kip, especially, but I wonder if he was always Steve Rogers in her head, and so she didn't notice that she needed to. In contrast, I think she handled Ilya's emotionally complicated backstory in Heated Rivalry very adeptly, and I can even see some places where I think she's foreshadowing some more things for Ilya and Shane in her later books, so she's very capable of writing a full character when she's not having to wade through a whole other IP to get there.
Maybe the lesson is to keep the concept, keep the plot, but otherwise just pretend like you’re writing a brand-new story and start it from scratch.
Other than the characters of Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov, that is. Those two should obviously be characters in EVERY book.
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