Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Out of the Penalty Box
SERIES: Locker Room Love #1
AUTHOR: Genevive Chamblee
PUBLISHER: Hot Tree Publishing
LENGTH: 131 pages
RELEASE DATE: December 2019
BLURB:
Two minutes in the box or a lifetime out
Hockey player Aidan Lefèvre’s professional and personal life is on ice. Recovering from an injury and traded to a new team, Aidan is attempting to prove his viability to his coaches, fans, and teammates. Just when he believes he’s succeeded, another accident during the playoffs threatens to unravel all of his progress.
Having relocated away from family and friends, Aidan turns to his extroverted team captain, Christophe Fontenot, whose jovial nature lifts everyone’s spirits. But when Aidan discovers his attraction for Christophe changes the meaning of “body checking,” Aidan questions more than his hockey skills.
Should he deny what he feels or come out of the “box?”
REVIEW:
I do love a good sports romance and this one is almost up to standard. On one level it’s a pretty typical coming-out/coming-to-terms story about a young man realizing that maybe, he’s not as straight as he thought. The odd combination of Louisiana and hockey was also made it a bit different from the norm.
That said there were some oddities. It’s clear that someone knows about hockey. The details when present seemed spot on, but they were presented in a weird way. I assume that the opening section of the tale was supposed to be an announcer giving us the rink-side play by play. But I’ve never heard an announcer be that fluent about a hockey game whilst mid-play before. Later there’s a pretty detailed segment presented as a news story. I’ve never read something that felt less like realistic journalism.
Following that, there’s a mid-trip airport meet-up that resolves a number of plot issues that made little sense, introduced new characters into the mix, and felt like someone had cobbled together something to make two pre-existing writing assignments into one more comprehensible story.
There’s also a bit of a language problem here… It’s certainly to be expected to have hockey-players speaking French, particularly those from Quebec. But as an avid fan of the Poirot mysteries I’ve seen how French can be incorporated into a story without interrupting the flow of the story. Here, several times I had to halt my reading and resort to Google translate to make certain I wasn’t missing anything important. I generally wasn’t, and it might not really have been necessary, but a little less “gallic charm” might be a good idea going forward.
Finally I was a bit surprised by the blurb used to describe this book in that I’d interpreted it to mean that one of the MCs sustained an injury in the playoff game. It’s clear in the first chapter that that’s NOT what happened.
This is the first in a series. Perhaps it was a bit rough around the edges. But if the problem spots are overlooked, the rest does introduce us to some interesting characters. It’s not exactly painful to endure, and I am curious about where the author will take us from here.
RATING: 
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