Slap Shot - Book Review

By Kelly Jamieson

Synopsis

My name’s Max Hall, and I need to f***. As a pro hockey player who’s been away from the game for over a year, my libido has picked one hell of an inconvenient time to come roaring back to life.

After my wife died from a rare form of cancer, sex was the last thing on my mind. Same with hockey, the other love of my life. Now, after fifteen months of eating too much, drinking too much, and generally just feeling sorry for myself, I’m facing a steep uphill battle to get my ass in shape and play my way back onto the Chicago Aces.

So I’m not looking for a relationship. Just sex. Yeah, I know how that makes me sound. But the truth is, I’ll never love another woman the way I loved my wife. When I meet a sexy bridesmaid at my teammate’s wedding, I decide to scratch that itch. A fling with Kendra Armstrong in her posh hotel room could be just what the trainer ordered.

Not only is Kendra smokin’ hot, she’s dynamite in bed—one of the perks of being a sex toy designer. Since she lives in New York anyway, we agree to keep things casual, no strings attached. The arrangement is perfect . . . until one of us falls in love. And it’s not me.

Review

I hate to say it, but I struggled with SLAP SHOT. It did not engage me and despite skimming through several chapters towards the end, it still took me four days to finish reading this book.

Character wise, I can’t say much about Kendra other than she was nice and was way too good for someone like Max. I can however say quite a bit about Max, and not for good reasons. This is a man who lost the love of his life, yet I found I didn’t like him and felt no sympathy towards him at all. He constantly blurred the line of his sex-only relationship with Kendra, yet she was the one who ruined a good thing when she thought he’d be willing to take what they had to the next level. And for a man who claimed he’d never love another woman as much as he did his wife, he certainly had no problem making unflattering comments about her when comparing her to Kendra.

Story wise, I found it quite repetitive, with most of the story being made up of three things:
1 – Max discussing his training, his diet, and listing all the food he eats;
2 – Max and Kendra meeting up, having a copious amount of sex and then parting ways; and
3 – Max consumed by guilt for spending time with Kendra and being happy with her.

I really wanted to like this story. I really did. But not liking Max and finding the story too repetitive prevented me from doing so. SLAP SHOT is told in Max’s POV, except for the epilogue which is told in Kendra’s POV. While it is part of a series, it can be read as a stand-alone, though I did have trouble keeping up with the scenes that involved all the previous couples from this series.