As part of my prepping for the new year, I decided to take stock of my digital bookshelves and do some housekeeping. In doing so I clocked Countdown to a Kiss by Piper Rayne on my Chirp shelf. It must have been a Friday Freebie I downloaded at some point. It’s a quick hockey romance novella centered on a New Year’s Eve party, so it felt like something I should listen to around the actual holiday or delete from my to read shelf in the app, so I loaded it up while I spent Friday alone at work.
Having now listened to it, I probably could have just skipped it. It’s not bad, but it’s not very good either.
This is apparently a prequel to Rayne’s Hockey Hotties series (which I would have known if I had paid attention to the cover, but I didn’t because audiobook) and focuses on three professional hockey players from the fictional Florida Fury as they encounter three women at their team owner’s New Year’s Eve party at his beachfront mansion. The reader spends time with each of the three pairs, basically getting expanded meet cutes across one night. For what is less than 2 hours of audio, we have six different POVs (and multiple narrators) and track events in progress as various action points hand the narration from one character to another across the party. It is… too much. I get it but balancing the various downturns of the players professional lives (and their conversations with the owner) and the reasons for the women to be present at the party is all a bit much for the book to manage. This probably works a lot better as a bonus read after the three books featuring the main pairs, but as it is this was a perfectly fine way to spend 90+ minutes that I probably won’t think about again.
