Body Check (Deirdre Martin)

Summary:
Janna MacNeil is the new publicist for the New York Blades, a hockey team filled to bursting with bad boys who have no qualms about tainting hockey's greatest prize, the Stanley Cup, to a strip club with them. Janna is hired to clean up after this and countless other messes. Ty Gallagher is the captain of the Blades, and has a stubborn streak wider than most. Janna needs to wrangle Ty and the rest of the Blades while they make another run for the Cup under the watchful eye of the Blades' parent company Kidco. Can Janna manage to get Ty and the Blades to play by Kidco's rules?

Thoughts:
I'm a big hockey fan. It's semi-recent, but I'm very enthusiastic about it nonetheless. When I found out there were a couple of romance series out there that were hockey-related, I was looking forward to getting into them. I started the Rachel Gibson series a while ago, and not in the right order (which I hate doing), and then found that Deirdre Martin has one too. I jumped right into getting the first of the Martin series, and was really excited. Note the word "was." It started out pretty okay, though you could see Janna was going to hook up with Ty from a mile away. But I pushed on. And then the first seduction scene started happening, and I thought, "No! This is too soon! It reads like a daydream! What are you doing?" But by that point, they were already doing it on the kitchen floor. Seriously, people? You know each other a month, and you're down and dirty on the floor? Seriously?? I tried to like the book. I WANTED to like it. The hockey talk reads like a fan wrote it, thank God. But the pacing was just WRONG. There's a quote on the front of the book from a Millie Criswell, who seems to have her own bestseller called "Mad about Mia," who is quoted as saying "Fun, fast-paced and sexy... a dazzling debut." Okay, I get the sexy, thanks to the overabundance of sex throughout. The fun is stretching it a bit. Janna agonizes about the relationship and that they need to keep it secret or she'll get fired. She agonizes about her best friend almost being raped by one of the players on the team. She agonizes about the asshole guy she works with who nearly forces her out of the job. She agonizes about not being good enough to actually HAVE her job in the first place. She agonizes about falling for Ty and him not returning her feelings. Oh, and there's hockey. I don't see the agonizing and whining as being "fun," but maybe Millie likes her main characters to constantly be in agony. The "fast-paced" part is completely accurate, though. It was so fast, that I didn't realize until at least two-thirds of the way through the book that we were looking at months and months of time between page 1 and page 325, not just a few weeks. Because Martin only notes the passage of time when she feels like it. She hardly shows that it's gone from October to December until suddenly there's a Christmas party. And a mere fifty pages later, it's suddenly April. And then it's June. Where has the time gone? I have no idea how long these two were actually together before they inevitably broke up (because every "good" romance novel has a break-up) and then finally get back together. And while the story is written from Janna's and Ty's point of view, you never get to really see what Ty's thinking because he fights his feelings at every turn. So the ending, which I won't be horrible and spoil, comes so out of left field, that you can't believe it's happened, and then there they are with the happily ever after. Since this is obviously a first novel for Martin, (I say obviously because the amateurish plot line screams "new writer!") I'm tempted to find book two, in the hopes that maybe she's gotten better. But it's hard to get myself around to the idea. This one was just HORRIBLY paced, and when something throws your mind out of the plot like this writing did, it's tough to get into reading more. Fingers crossed, Ms. Martin. You get one more shot.

Book 7 of 50

Pages: 325
Genre: romance, with a lot of hockey
Grade: C
Would I Recommend?: Meh. It's better hockey than the Gibson series, but far worse romance... Which is more important?