Reviewed by True
TITLE: Season’s Change
SERIES: Trade Season #1
AUTHOR: Cait Nary
PUBLISHER: Carina Press
LENGTH: 380 pages
RELEASE DATE: February 1, 2022
BLURB:
A veteran hockey player and a rookie can’t get away from each other—or their own desires—in this sexy, heartfelt opposites-attract hockey romance.
Olly Järvinen has a long way to go. He’s got a fresh start playing for a new team, but getting his hockey career back on track is going to take more than a change of scenery. He’s got to shut his past out and focus. On the game, not on his rookie roommate and his annoyingly sunny disposition—and annoyingly distracting good looks.
All Benji Bryzinski ever wanted was to play in the big leagues, and he’s not going to waste one single second of his rookie season. Yoga, kale smoothies and guided meditation help keep his head in the game. But his roommate keeps knocking him off track. Maybe it’s just that Olly is a grumpy bastard. Or maybe it’s something else, something Benji doesn’t have a name for yet.
Olly and Benji spend all their time together—on the ice, in the locker room, in their apartment—and ignoring their unspoken feelings isn’t making them go away. Acting on attraction is one thing, but turning a season’s fling into forever would mean facing the past—and redefining the future.
REVIEW:
I had mixed feelings while reading. I expected a romance, I found just a little. The author has a compelling way of writing, if this was not the case I wouldn’t continue the story. The slow pace cost me my nails, it was so slow.
There’s a lot of hockey in this story, a LOT, every part of it is in the picture, at times I scrolled through them. I do love sports in a story, but not too much, not as main. I’m certain other readers will love it.
We can watch Olly and Benji, working hard, struggling with matters, their blooming friendship, and at last their romance.
Olly isn’t out, he was going through a lot, he suffering, still is. Benji is the straight supportive one here. Most of the time they are friends, there’s a mutual attraction. I even came to a point and thought they would never end up as a couple, they were mostly buddies. They spent all their time together, private and with sports.
There are some heavier topics, anxiety, depression, abuse, internalized homophobia, some matters with family. It’s not a light-hearted story, more an angsty one. The friendship to lovers building was nicely developed, I knew it was a romance, at some point, as I said before I really thought it would stay a friendship, because sloooow burn, ugh, not fully my thing.
What I loved about the characters was how they were flawed. That’s what made them human.
The steam came late into the story, but when it arrived it was sweet.
There are some nice secondary characters, (not a certain sister) who had a good place in this story, I loved the teammates!
Overall a widely written hockey story, there was a lot of passion about hockey, it was the main, for my pleasure I missed some romance, the story was way too large and the pace too slow, the only fast thing in this story was the ending, an HFN ending.
RATING: 
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