ICING

A MM Hockey Romance

By: Chris Savage

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

He's the last person I should want. He's the only person I do.

Cole Briggs was Chicago's golden boy—until he came out and they traded him to a team that doesn't exist yet. Now he's the face of the Atlanta Reapers, an NHL expansion franchise built from castoffs and second chances. He's ready to prove Chicago wrong. He's ready to lead. He is absolutely, categorically not ready for Mikhail Volkov.

Mik is six-foot-three of cold Russian granite with a scar through his eyebrow and the emotional range of a parking meter. He doesn't talk. He doesn't smile. He hip-checked Cole into the boards two years ago and never even apologized. And now, thanks to the world's worst housing coordinator, they're sharing a hotel room for training camp.

One room. One bed. One Russian who won't stop being shirtless.

Cole can't stand him. Mik won't look at him. The tension between them could melt the ice they play on. And when a road trip, a snowstorm, and a single hotel room conspire to put them exactly where neither of them wants to be—close enough to stop pretending—the thing they've been fighting turns out to be the thing they can't live without.

But Mik has spent his entire life in the closet, and Cole has spent his entire career being the NHL's most visible out player. Going public means risking Mik's family, his career, and everything he's built behind his mask. Staying secret means asking Cole to go back into the dark he fought so hard to leave.

The ice doesn't care who you love. The world does.

Icing is an enemies-to-lovers MM hockey romance with scorching heat, a grumpy Russian defenseman, a golden boy with a chip on his shoulder, and an HEA that'll make you ugly-cry on public transit. First in the Power Play series. Dual POV. No cliffhanger. KU enrolled.

Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, only one bed, forced proximity, secret relationship, coming out, he falls first, bi MC/gay MC

Deserved a human narrator

Short take: this book was very good, and I would like audible to make the rest of the series available. It’s on kindle but that doesn’t help if you have trouble seeing or reading.

Other:
Wow. That was good!

Below is a lot of words from me saying mostly what this work is not, and some thoughts on behind the scenes efforts which are sometimes needed to make the virtual voice listening experience less awful.

Explaining what this book is is more difficult because it’s subtle. It has the kind of attention to detail and craftsmanship which, when done properly, does not stand out.

Best part in my opinion was that the writing didn’t rely on common phrases which are usually shared in romance writing (“didn’t know where I stopped and you began” “released a breath I didn’t know I’d need holding”) and this was not just effective prose, it was moving in sneaky ways. I could use several sports comparisons here but won’t, since the author didn’t inflict those upon us, either.

Sex wasn’t fade-to-black, it wasn’t prose which suddenly becomes vague or brings up ‘hearts becoming whole’ or ‘essences entwining’, it wasn’t the standard, almost identical depiction one finds in this genre when the writer tries to present something more graphic, either. It was good, plot driven, and detailed as anything else in the work.

Tropes were gently and successfully made use of without the expectation that the presence of the trope would do the work of genuinely good prose and content. This is not faint praise.

This book was available to me as part of the ‘free’ part of the audible library. A majority of the ‘free’ books I’ve encountered while looking for specific content are not as polished or are a teaser for the rest of a series for which one needs to pay. This book is neither, though I’d welcome the rest of the books like, yesterday.

It has some surface similarities to the book Heated Rivalry, but is very much its own thing.

If it’s not clear by the title of this review, I hate virtual voice. However, given that there are a lot of reasons that people actually need text in audio form and in general those who make decisions about spending priorities at the corporate level seldom choose both quantity and quality at all, much less for what is considered a low-profit demographic, I’ll try to be grateful that this book was made available at all.

One author told me he needed to review his own virtual voice books and eliminate or reduce the mispronunciations and other errors which creep in and make understanding more difficult. This book’s virtual voice didn’t have the usual lousy mispronunciations or voiced code or common glitches which can yank a listener out of the story.
Maybe this was luck, or maybe someone put in the time to clean up the standard errors, but it made a difference.

I’d still rather that someone in power over narration choices had realized that this was a good book, one that was not littered with lazy prose or the usual phrases which seem almost a requisite for romances, that this is a good book with enough stress and enough joy to be satisfying, that this was a good book which deserved actual human voices for the very human story. Just saying.