Kelly Farmer’s Calling the Shots is a solidly entertaining and emotional contemporary sapphic romance. This is the third in her On the Ice series about professional women’s hockey players. She’s gotten stronger and more confident with each book. The characters are more comfortably layered and complex and the push/pull of Regan and Tierney relationship flows easily, even the third act break-up.
Regan Lane has gone from being a professional women’s hockey megastar, to an assistant coach for a middling professional men’s hockey team. She has a reputation for being outspoken with the press. While talking to reporters after her team’s loss, she’s told there may be a head coach position open in the women’s league. Her response, that she would win the championship her first year, becomes known as The Challenge. Tierney McGovern is already the winningest head coach in the (short) history of the professional women’s hockey league, but she feels like she still has to fight for credibility. When Regan takes the job as the Boston head coach, the two are positioned as rivals. Regan thinks it’s all good fun, but Tierney is frustrated that the attention is because of Regan and not her own stellar work.
The two have some similar issues – they tend to keep people out and push people away, but they do it in different ways. Farmer does a great job of weaving in their strengths and weaknesses, their joys and fears so that the characters feel real, grounded, and complicatedly human. The well deployed dual POV shows it’s less that one has baggage to get over and more that both have issues to sort through. We get to see the ways in which they obliviously stumble into hurting each other, and also the choices they make to love and support each other. Tierney’s daughter was a fun kid to read.
This is a third book, but it can be read as a stand alone.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Carina and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.
A note: The HarperCollins union goes on strike starting Thursday 11/10. This is the last review of a book published by Harper Collins or it’s subsidiaries that I will post until the strike is over. Employees deserve to be paid a living wage.