Book Review: Puck Drills & Quick Thrills
Sports and a close family dynamic is a combination that had me picking up Puck Drills & Quick Thrills by Eden Finley and Saxon James. I was also curious about the dual authorship as I had not previously read a book that was written by two authors. With its catchy title and interesting relationship premise between a college professor and coach, I decided to dive in and see if this book lived up to my expectations.
Official Summary
WESTLY
The fall from NHL superstar to domestic disaster was swift and painful. When I became the legal guardian of my five younger siblings, I had no idea what I was doing.
One year later, I’m still lost.
Coaching CU’s hockey team might be the only thing I’m excelling at. But when our star forward is failing math, I have to do what it takes to keep him on the team. Even if it’s going head-to-head with Jasper Eckstein.
One minute I’m confronting the notorious hockey-hating professor, and the next I’m agreeing to be his date to his twenty-year high school reunion.
I don’t know how that happened.
JASPER
My rules are simple. I don’t give extra credit. Ever. No matter how entitled jocks think they are, I refuse to give them special treatment.
It's not because I hate them. It's not because a hockey player broke my nose in high school.
It's fair.
But when Westly Dalton bursts into my office like a hurricane, all my principles fly out the window.
Suddenly I'm giving extra credit.
And I have a date to my reunion.
After one explosive night together, I want more, but his home life is a mess, and I don't want to get in the way. If all we can have is quick thrills, I’m okay with that.
It’s not like I could ever fall for a jock.
Quick Information
Authors: Eden Finley and Saxon James
Published: October 6, 2021
Genre: Romance, M/M Romance, Contemporary Romance
Review
Puck Drills & Quick Thrills is the fifth and final book of the CU Hockey series following hockey players, coaches, and professors of Colchester University. I haven’t read the previous books in the series, but I don’t feel as though any incoming reader will feel lost for skipping ahead.
This book follows Westly Dalton, a former NHL star who canceled his contract to head home and raise his younger siblings after his parents died in a car accident. With five other siblings to take care of, Westley is struggling to stay afloat. To add to his already growing issues, his brother Asher is starting to fail math. In order to salvage his brother's grades and his hockey eligibility, Westley confronts Jasper Eckstein, the math professor, for assistance. Unfortunately for Westley, Jasper hates hockey players.
I enjoyed the dynamic of the college professor and coach presented here up to a point. Usually the more common trope involves a student/teacher pairing, but I found it refreshing to have something different. I thought it might come with less drama (we’ll get to that shortly). Not to say there isn’t some initial drama and a slight age gap here, mind you.
Jasper Eckstein is a likeable character despite his rocky introduction. The authors do a good job of fleshing out his character and explaining why he is the way he is. His particular backstory felt very believable as many people have adverse interactions with jocks in their youth that negatively color their perception of sporty people as adults.
Westley in contrast was a less fleshed out character despite his family drama playing an overbearing role in the narrative. The authors establish Westley’s previous party-boy lifestyle through exposition rather than showing it. The reader is told he had to make sacrifices for his siblings and feels torn between his past lifestyle and the reality of his current situation. The majority of his character development revolves around a back and forth, push and pull between wanting to go out and have fun and feeling incredibly guilty for having his own life. He constantly expresses self-awareness that he’s responsible for his siblings but also feels overwhelmed by becoming a parent overnight. This internal conflict became a bit tedious and repetitive at times, not really adding much to the story or showing personal growth. It was exhausting to read and drained any steam the romantic plot tried to build up.
In the first half of the story, Jasper and Westley’s burgeoning relationship was enjoyable. Some funny dialogue and clever lines kept the story light-hearted. However, as the story progresses, Jasper somehow becomes less and less a main character in a book that’s about his own relationship with Westley. This happens because Westley’s excessive family drama takes center stage in the back half of the book. Jasper and Westley still have private time together, but those moments weren’t enough to keep me engaged with the story.
I never thought as a romance connoisseur that I’d ever say there’s such a thing as “too many sex scenes” but this book managed to make me say it. These scenes felt repetitive and clunky. I don’t know if the authors may have swapped writing with POV shifts or for specific scenes, but there was a spectrum of quality between the sex scenes. Some felt more polished than others.
If you are a hockey fan you won’t find any enjoyment with this story. There are far better sports romance novels which better involve the sport than Puck Drills & Quick Thrills. To me, it felt as though the authors simply wanted to use the sport for a catchy title and the initial conflicting dynamic between the main characters.
Further, if you’re not a fan of romance stories with overly rambunctious children playing a prominent role in the story, this story might not be for you. Writing children isn’t easy, and I feel as though the authors struggled with finding the individual voices of the large cast of children characters. There are several other stories out there that involve large families while still maintaining a cohesive story and romance.
Overall this story had its moments, but it couldn’t carry those moments throughout the story. The ending seemed to especially drag as the story unfortunately overstayed its welcome. The authors were juggling too much at once. If you are looking for any of these specific tropes or dynamics, you might find Puck Drills & Quick Thrills worth borrowing from your local library or reading if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription.