


“A team united-a fraternity, a brotherhood-is stronger than a force of nature.Romance is not a series of smiles and meaningful stares! I want to read actual conversations.Īnother issue with the writing was how often attempts at sounding poetic failed. There are so many of them, and they’re used for so many important moments.

The best way I can explain it is to say that Bauer writes in montages. Here, there was an entire fucking book and the author chose insta-love. But more importantly, Shang-Chi is not about the romance between the parents so you can’t dedicate much time to it even if you want to. You know that scene in the movie Shang-Chi when we see Shang’s parents fall in love in a montage of them fighting? The scenes of Bryce and Hunter supposedly falling in love were like that, only not nearly as well done. But then the two actually met, during All-Star Weekend, and proceeded to fall in love in three montages. We got into his feelings of being on a crappy team and how excited he was to finally meet Bryce, who’s supposed to be one of best players in the NHL. The first chapter with the other MC, Hunter, was less jarring. It just tells me what you want them to be, and then you actually have to work to get the feeling of camaraderie. But you telling me how close everyone is doesn’t make me believe it. The purpose of the practice was to tell us, between showing off hockey knowledge, how close they all were to Bryce, who is one of our MCs. I didn’t know any of them and the author hadn’t introduced them. And then the author proceeded to lead us through a hockey practice featuring said names. The first paragraph had the names of 4 different people, none of whom were the protagonist. Because this reading experience was a bit of a mess from the start. But if this is a typical example of his writing and story style, then we’re not going to get along. It’s a hockey romance and I like those, and I’d heard great things about Tal Bauer. Genre: Adult Romance, Contemporary, M/M, Sports
