I love sports, and I love romance. On paper, the boom in sports romances in recent years seems to have been tailor made for me, but they have not really worked as a whole. Other than Liz Tomforde’s Windy City books, none of the sports romances I’ve picked up in the past few years have worked for me. I generally find them to be painfully predictable and boring, and as someone tragically familiar with transfer sagas, the whole team-as-found-family thing reads really exhausting to me.
So when Kate Canterbary, one of my favourite romance authors who I think is painfully underrated, announced her next book, a romance with a quarterback main character, I was extremely hesitant to try it. The only thing that made me read it at all was the fact that Canterbary has never missed in all the twenty books I’ve read from her over the past three years (I went on a bit of a bender in 2022). Turns out, I should just trust her with everything no matter how much I hate the premise.
The thing that made this the ideal sports romance is that it is set entirely in the off season. I know it doesn’t make sense, why would a sports romance go out of its way to not involve the actual sport? I guess to me personally it makes for a better read because I think, other than all the reasons I dislike sports romance, setting it during the season and the games tends to at time be at the expense of the development of the non-player character. This book manages to keep the appeal of an athlete romantic interest without an overindulgence in his professional perspective.
All the regular Kate Canterbary gush points stand. Her characters are delectably well formed and she does such a good job of explaining their history through their dialogue and comfort with each other rather than an over reliance on flashbacks. It has one of my favourite female friendships I have read in any book. If you’re looking for a new formulaic-but-still-very-novel romance, give this one a try!
