ARC Review: Game Misconduct by Ari Baran

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Game Misconduct Game Misconduct by Ari Baran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars rounded up

This book was straight up baffling to read. The two main components of the book, the hockey and the romance, were equally weird and made me question if I knew anything at all about hockey or reading romance.

To start, the hockey. I was initially ok with the idea of the two main characters being enforcers but they were Extreme Enforcers who fought multiple times every game. In the year of our lord 2023, hockey fighting and enforcers are barely a thing. The players in real life hockey who fight a lot have maybe 12-14 fights an entire season! What makes it even more confusing as a character choice is this is a league that's progressive enough to have a female hockey player. It makes no sense to have both of these be true at once and still have a homophobic league.

As for the rest of the hockey it was all a little...off. Like words might be used in hockey but they were slightly out of place or lacked context or seemed tacked on to prove Hockey Knowledge. Normally I can look past this but it was way too much and the romance wasn't enough to distract me.

Which leads me to the romance. There is barely any of it in the book which was disappointing. Everything seemed to happen off page except some very long explicit scenes and the fighting. And the bulk of the book was preoccupied with Danny's addiction issues and his refusal to get help about it and then it was all just handwaved away at the end.

I rounded up to 3 stars because there was enough to keep me reading but I would've preferred way less hockey and fighting and serious addiction and mental health issues that weren't well represented in the book anyway and way more romance and caretaking and pining and buying flowers for each other. I am intrigued enough to try the author's next book but I really hope they try to do way less things in it.

I received an ARC copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

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