TITLE: Pucked Up
AUTHOR: Frankie Abraham
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 207 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2025
BLURB:
The man I broke is back—and he’s not here to heal.
I shattered his collarbone in front of twenty thousand screaming fans.
One reckless hit. One sickening crunch. One choice I’ll never take back.
I thought I’d buried my hockey career—and myself—in the woods.
But now he’s standing on my porch.
Noah Langley, the rookie I destroyed.
He says he wants the truth, but I see it in his eyes.
The way he watches my hands. The way he leans closer when he thinks I won’t notice.
He doesn’t want closure. And he doesn’t want revenge.
He wants pain.
He wants me.
And God help us both, I want him too—wrecked and ruined.
We’re not a second chance. We’re a slow-motion crash.
But we might be the only thing keeping each other breathing.
This isn’t forgiveness.
It’s obsession.
And if I touch him again, I won’t stop.
Not until he’s mine.
Pucked Up is a 53,000-word dark mm hockey romance.
This title is accurate, as this is one pucked up story. Not sure what I was expecting, but this really wasn’t it. There is very little hockey in this, aside from the initial incident that seemingly set this whole story into motion. But, even that was really confusing. I kept expecting this to get clearer as the story went on, but aside from continually reminding us of it without further explanation, I pretty much gave up and moved on.
Turns out, the reasons behind the initial incident are even more “pucked up” than one can imagine, and they really just were into S&M but didn’t know how to express that or get over their insecurities about it. Figuring this out and then executing violence all based off of a look seemed really irresponsible, and if you watch hockey at all, you know how easily this could have ended up so much worse for both guys. Lord knows I love me some dark and/or violent stories, but this one just didn’t work for me. It seemed a line was blurred between actual S&M and violence. I really struggled with inflicting pain on someone through injuries as opposed to finding safer S&M practices to give someone the pain they desire.
Beyond that, these two dance around each other trying to give and get what they each need/want and feel the other does, all while still not really communicating. At times, I was expecting them to be role playing that they were basically strangers. I had a lot of unanswered questions and never really got drawn into the characters.
While I did like the initial premise of this story, the execution just didn’t fulfill my needs and I struggled to really enjoy it.
