On The Brink - Book Review

By Kate Willoughby

Synopsis

Due to popular demand, Kate Willoughby brings you Hart Griffin and Jeremy Fenton’s origin story. Find out how these two met and fell in love…

Holtzer University junior Hart Griffin won’t let anything interfere with his future as a professional hockey player. No way, no how. He’s the star forward of his college team and a first round NHL draft pick.

A night with a male super fan calls into question everything Hart thought he knew about his sexuality and launches Hart on a soul-searching journey in which nothing is as it seems and his entire world is turned upside down.

Review

If you’ve been keeping up-to-date with this series, you’ll know that in ACROSS THE LINE, Hart revealed to the world that he was gay and in a relationship with his roommate, Jeremy. ON THE BRINK is a prequel novella that shows how the two met and became a couple.

While we’ve seen a bit of Hart throughout the series, Jeremy has remained mostly in the background, but that’s not the case with this book. Here we see that Jeremy is an out and proud gay man in college, where his vehicle is targeted with vandalism and his body is targeted with physical assault. Despite the threats to himself and his property, he never hides who he is. He’s funny and easygoing, and nothing gets him down for long. The best word I can think of to describe Jeremy is ‘cute’; even his crush on Hart was cute.

Jeremy had never actually met him in person. He’d only ogled him from afar, but judging from appearances, he was flawless.

While Jeremy is out and proud, Hart is struggling with his sexuality. I don’t think he ever really questioned it until he saw Jeremy and felt a spark. But he dreams of playing in the NHL and he believes that being gay will ruin that dream, so he spends quite a lot of the story denying his feelings and hurting Jeremy in the process.

ON THE BRINK is told in dual POVs and while it’s a prequel novella, I’d recommend reading it after ACROSS THE LINE. As with most novellas, the story is very rushed and I wish it had been fleshed out a bit more as it was hard to feel their connection when they hadn’t really spent much time together. I should mention that this is set in 2003 and there were a couple of instances where I believe the technology mentioned was more advanced than what it was for that time period. But overall, I enjoyed learning how Hart and Jeremy came to be a couple and thought this was a very nice addition to the series.