I read Winning It All (Hometown Players) based on the description from the Smart Bitches, Trashy books twitter feed. I’ve been going to professional hockey games since I was a wee little sprite. The cover photo made me laugh for a long time. Also, one of my favorite players, Mathieu Perrault, is French Canadian. He once celebrated a win like this.
Amazing, right? Anyway. so this book has Sebastian Deveau who plays defense for the pro team in Seattle (this may happen some day, but does not exist now) and the heroine is Shayne Beckford.
Shayne’s father is a womanizer. She is a yoga instructor. Sebastian and Shayne have lots of bendy sex. There is no evidence during the book why these two people like each other, let alone love each other by the end (spoiler: it’s a romance novel). She’s cold and distant to Sebastian all the time, and it reaches a point in the story where I wondered why he was even pursuing her. He’s a serial dater although he seems like a decent person. I did laugh out loud when it is revealed that Sebastian is studying architecture and designed his house. The author tried really hard to make her stud hockey player multi-dimensional. So why is her heroine so flat?
Shayne just isn’t likable. It also baffles me that her dad is a terrible person and no character at any point doesn’t say “Hey, this isn’t the 1950’s anymore, so knock it off.” I hadn’t read any of the other books in this series but I liked all of the other female characters in it (including her mother who is a complete pushover) better than Shayne. That is never a good sign.