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heuse1ac 's review for:
Crossing Blades
by Hayden Hall
Meh?
Okay so this book is about two guys (Riley and Cameron) who were best friends in high school and hooked up every Sunday for a few months. Both of them had rough home lives, though Cam had it much worse comparatively. And Riley caught feelings but Cam decided he needed to escape everything about his life, and instead of continuing to college with Riley as planned, packed up and moved across the country. Now three years later, Cam is back in Riley's life and on Riley's hockey team, where Riley is now the captain. And there are a lot of emotions in that as they do the whole second chance childhood best friends to enemies to lovers journey.
I don't know that I've ever said this about a book in my entire life, especially a contemporary romance, but this book would have been better as a single POV. Riley and Cam had such disparate memories of their history together (mostly because Cam's repression game was on point because it was easier) that it just made everything confusing. But Cam was the interesting one here in every way. Riley's emotional chapters never really went anywhere from hurt at the past but still horny asf for this first love who would dom him just the way he needed. Riley already knew everyone on the team, they didn't really do much with him being the captain, they didn't really do much with the whole starting story of him being the one to lose the championship for them last year, and everything about the future of their hockey careers could've been told from Cam's perspective too (and often was). If this book had been structured so the prologue was Riley's POV, give us the pain, give us the emotional upheaval, and then switch to Cam for the entire book, that would be so interesting. We would get his coming to the new team and meeting everyone, his interactions with Riley and his view of him and how he'd grown, having to really confront how deeply he'd hurt Riley in the past, the slow realization of everything building up again and confirming the things he was too afraid to confront when he was 18, like THAT'S THE STORY. And Riley's chapters didn't contribute enough for me to want his POV, we knew exactly where he stood.
That being said, I did like this book, certainly more than enough to continue in the series. I like Hall's writing style, the way he writes the spicy scenes for them, the next book is jock/nerd tutoring, like all systems are go. I just think the bones of the book would've been better served by a different structure.
Okay so this book is about two guys (Riley and Cameron) who were best friends in high school and hooked up every Sunday for a few months. Both of them had rough home lives, though Cam had it much worse comparatively. And Riley caught feelings but Cam decided he needed to escape everything about his life, and instead of continuing to college with Riley as planned, packed up and moved across the country. Now three years later, Cam is back in Riley's life and on Riley's hockey team, where Riley is now the captain. And there are a lot of emotions in that as they do the whole second chance childhood best friends to enemies to lovers journey.
I don't know that I've ever said this about a book in my entire life, especially a contemporary romance, but this book would have been better as a single POV. Riley and Cam had such disparate memories of their history together (mostly because Cam's repression game was on point because it was easier) that it just made everything confusing. But Cam was the interesting one here in every way. Riley's emotional chapters never really went anywhere from hurt at the past but still horny asf for this first love who would dom him just the way he needed. Riley already knew everyone on the team, they didn't really do much with him being the captain, they didn't really do much with the whole starting story of him being the one to lose the championship for them last year, and everything about the future of their hockey careers could've been told from Cam's perspective too (and often was). If this book had been structured so the prologue was Riley's POV, give us the pain, give us the emotional upheaval, and then switch to Cam for the entire book, that would be so interesting. We would get his coming to the new team and meeting everyone, his interactions with Riley and his view of him and how he'd grown, having to really confront how deeply he'd hurt Riley in the past, the slow realization of everything building up again and confirming the things he was too afraid to confront when he was 18, like THAT'S THE STORY. And Riley's chapters didn't contribute enough for me to want his POV, we knew exactly where he stood.
That being said, I did like this book, certainly more than enough to continue in the series. I like Hall's writing style, the way he writes the spicy scenes for them, the next book is jock/nerd tutoring, like all systems are go. I just think the bones of the book would've been better served by a different structure.