★★★★★ 5
Making my love for hockey (and the players) stronger
Format: Kindle
She manages to create such realistic characters that readers can’t help fall in love with. The Deal is no. exception to that. This book is actually our first introduction to her amazing world of obscenely attractive and crazy talented hockey players at Briar University. Wasting no time, we get straight to the wonderful and hot captain, Garrett Graham.
Garrett is a history major in his third year at Briar. Here is where Ms. Kennedy does something different, in shows, movies, and books we often see teachers and professors cutting slack for athletes especially ones that are currently in season. Yeah no, that’s not the case at Briar. Enter: Hannah Wells. If I am being technical, we start of in her perspective however I’m in love with Garrett, so we ignore that. The two of them are taking some sort of philosophical ethics course and when the story kicks off, they are getting their midterms back. You ever have that teacher that literally has either way two high of standards, can’t teach or both? I don’t know what the case is in this situation, but the majority of the class bombs that midterm, except for Hannah (and a few other students). Garrett is among those who failed however he is majorly screwed because if he doesn’t ace this makeup, he is no longer academically eligible for sports. After literally bumping into Hannah on his way out of the lecture hall, he sees her grade and decides that this girl will be his tutor and he won’t take no for an answer. He is relentless in his pursuit of her tutoring him that he goes so far as showing up at her work to beg. Finally, he finds the one thing he can offer to make her say yes: a fake date to catch another guy’s attention. Yeah, that fun cliché. She agrees to tutor him only through the retake because she is too focused on her winter showcase for the music department to tutor him all semester. Predictably speaking, that whole fake dating thing, yeah that backfires. I wonder sometimes if it ever works in any way other than making one of the two people realize they have feelings for each other.
Believe it or not though my favorite part of the book wasn’t the romance aspects of it. Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed that don’t get me wrong. It was the way that Hannah and Garrett actually became friends and spent time together as friends outside of studying and trying to get her crush’s attention. They binged Breaking bad, watched stupid documentaries and she hung out with the rest of the team celebrating one of their birthdays. This is something that in my opinion gets missed a lot in romance is that if two people are friends and fake dating, we want to see them actually being friends and not just a couple.
Her characters are also so real. Like yes there’s no way this many perfect men exist for her to write 9 books about the hockey players that come through Briar. But that’s not what I mean, I mean her characters have substance to them, they have this wonderful thing that we all as real people have: past traumas. That being said, if you are a person that gets triggered by characters having been abused or sexually assaulted in the past, please consider this your trigger warning. This did all happen prior to the books first page so what we see is the aftermath of the traumas and not the actual events taking place if that makes any difference. If that is you, I would urge you to reconsider reading the story and the rest of this review because I do intend on discussing a little bit of what happens with those situations and how Garrett and Hannah chose to respond to them. Consider this also your spoiler alert as well.
When Hannah was 15, she went to a party with friends. At this party she was drugged and raped. Now, roughly 6 years later, we see how this has affected her. She refuses to drink if she is not alone and has some problems with intimacy. The cool thing though is that she uses her friendship with Garrett to help her slowly work through these problems. Once he relatively knows what her hang ups are Garrett never once pressures her or belittles her for them only helping her to slowly move past them in any way he can even if it means he plays the “bodyguard” for a night out with their friends so she can drink and not feel scared. And of course, because this is a romance novel and those two are clearly meant to be he also helps her work through her problems with sex in such a slow and patient way that, in combination with everything else we’ve seen from him, makes all the sense in the world why he is loved not only by her (though she is too dumb to admit it till later) and by all of us as readers. Garrett’s past is not all sunshine and roses either. Son of a former NHL superstar, he had to watch his mother slowly die of cancer and watch as his father’s anger was directed in the form of physical violence at his mother, and later at him. Garrett was routinely abused by his father for years until he learned to hit back, no one saw any warning signs or stepped in ever. All they saw was a retired famous athlete and his equally athletically gifted son. Hannah is the first person he ever felt comfortable opening up to about this and is there for him as a place of support when he is essentially forced to spend thanksgiving with his father and his new girlfriend. She does whatever she can to support him and to remind him that no matter who your parents are, it doesn’t determine who you will be when you are older. This is such an important message that honestly everyone needs to hear as do many of the other men in this series just for different reasons than Garrett.
This book is honestly in my opinion perfect, and I don’t think I’ve stopped recommending it to people since the first time I finished it.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2022
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