Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: The New Guy
SERIES: Hockey Guys, Book 1
AUTHOR: Sarina Bowen
NARRATOR: Teddy Hamilton and J.F. Harding
PUBLISHER: Tuxbury Publishing, LLC
LENGTH: 9 hours and 49 minutes
RELEASE DATE: February 28, 2023
BLURB:
A new male/male hockey romance from 24-time USA Today best seller Sarina Bowen!
My name is Hudson Newgate, but my teammates call me “New Guy”.
That was my nickname in Chicago, too. And Vancouver. That’s what happens when you keep getting traded. Brooklyn is my last chance, especially after my poor performance last season.
But I can make this work. The new guy knows to keep his head down and shoot the puck. The new guy puts the game first.
What he doesn’t do is hook up with the other new guy—a hot athletic trainer who lives in my building. Gavin needs this job with my team. He’s a single dad with responsibilities.
We can’t be a couple. My arrogant agent–who’s also my father–will lose his mind if I’m dating a dude. And my team needs me to score goals, not whip up a media circus.
Too bad Gavin and I are terrible at resisting each other….
REVIEW:
With The New Guy, Sarina Bowen brings us a story all about “but”s. Yes, the story features plenty of hockey butts – who can resist the delectable physiques of professional hockey players like Hudson, and fit and fabulous athletic trainers like Gavin? Not me. But I digress …
Hudson and Gavin’s sports romance is all about the “but”. “But” as a preposition meaning except, that word that prefaces limitations, hesitations, and reasons why not. Hudson and Gavin come together like magnets from their first glance across a Brooklyn bar, and they fall fast and hard for each other, but …
Gavin is widower and scared to fall in love again.
Gavin is a single Dad that needs to put his daughter first.
Hudson isn’t out and Gavin has zero desire to return to the closet.
Hudson and Gavin are next-door neighbors and coworkers.
Hudson could get traded; Gavin might need to move or get another job …
Life has no guarantees and with so much on the line, how do you take a risk on love? Indeed, Hudson and Gavin navigate a lot of buts to get to their HEA, and it is not easy. Bowen consistently delivers sexy, sweet stories of mature men adulting – or at least trying to – while balancing their careers, families and romance. What I like best about her stories is how real and down-to-earth they are. She provides incisive, introspective, often self-effacing monologues alongside, sharp, witty banter. The New Guy is more melancholic than some of her other stories, but the angst level is still fairly low and appropriate given the context.
Hudson and Gavin are characters you like and root for, although at least for me, Hudson took a bit of warming up to. The greater story arc displays thoughtful character development and Bowen doesn’t shy away from revealing flaws even in our beloved leading men. The story builds on itself, gaining depth and momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. While a bit slow initially, by the end I felt a reread was in order to fully appreciate the nuanced story Bowen effortlessly tells.
Bowen enlists two A+ narrators in Teddy Hamilton (as Gavin) and J.F. Harding (as Hudson) to bring Hudson and Gavin’s love story to life. This is sexy times two with Hamilton and Harding’s rich, charismatic voices and wholly invested performances. The counterpoint of Hamilton’s tension-filled, often emphatic delivery with Harding’s deep, growly, whisky voice, tinted with a heavy weightiness that befits Hudson’s struggles, effectively showcases the personalities of these two men. Emotional connection is made tangible, and their dynamics and pacing capture the nuances of the dialogue and the story.
I rarely have any complaints about Hamilton and Harding. They have deliciously sexy voices and embrace textured, impactful storylines like this one with seeming ease, naturally morphing into character. However, Hamilton and Harding’s choice for the pitch and timbre of Hudson and Gavin’s voices reveals a flaw in the audio: their interpretation of the characters’ voices do not mesh. Hamilton does a mid-tone, distinctly Teddy Hamilton voice for Gavin and a lower, deeper voice for Hudson. This is how I hear these characters. However, Harding gives Hudson a fairly low pitch tinged with sadness and regret, but instead of going higher for Gavin, he goes lower with a gravelly rumble or raspy edge. Sometimes Gavin’s voice hovers in the same range as Hudson’s, although still distinguishable from each other. But at no time is Gavin’s voice in the higher mid-tone range Hamilton uses. In dual narration where the four-voice phenomenon presents a challenge for any narrator pair, a disconnect like this mismatch impairs seamless storytelling and is, frankly, a surprising misstep for two narrators of this caliber.
That being said, Hamilton and Harding get everything else right and their voices are so easy on the ears that when paired with excellent source material, which The New Guy undoubtedly is, it’s an absorbing listening experience that makes time fly. The New Guy audiobook is one I highly recommend.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS:
[…] The New Guy and I’m Your Guy, the first and second books, respectively, in Sarina Bowen’s Hockey Guys M/M sports romance series sit like bookends in their take on the closeted gay hockey player trope. I admit to some fretting in the early stages of I’m Your Guy because it started to feel like the same “I have to stay in the closet for the game” story as the first book, but for the addition of the prototypical athlete falls for the out and proud artist/fashion designer, or in this case interior decorator, trope. But Bowen’s writing is sharp and clever as always and it quickly became evident that I’m Your Guy does not tell the same story at all. In fact, it comes at the closeted player coming out trope from the other end of the spectrum. It’s also low on the angst meter, provides plenty of cute and funny moments, and really builds out the found-family relationship of the teammates. […]