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A review by phoenixinthecity
Anton by Brenda Rothert
1.0
This was way more angst then I was expecting in a sports romance because I was expecting a romcom. That being said, there were shades of Kennedy Ryan’s Long Shot and this was a very pale comparison.
We have Mia, who is mixed - she mentions being raised by her maternal black grandparents so her mother was black and her father was white - who left her husband Adam and Anton, who is her estranged husband’s hockey team captain. He fell in love at first sight with her over 2 years ago and had been pining for her ever since. Adam appeared to be largely emotionally abusive until she finally took Anton’s help and filed for divorce and that’s when he lost it and almost strangled her to death but she’s saved by her baseball bat wielding roommate.
Adam is arrested and when he’s out on bail, Anton follows him and beats the crap out of him in an alley for Mia and when he returns home bruised and roughed up himself, she knows it’s because he’d defended her honour, blah blah blah and was like, thank you. That was not the reaction I was expecting. Adam gets a misdemeanor, is released from the team and ends up playing hockey in Europe.
Anton’s crusty not-uncle dies of a stroke and the end.
I was hoping this was a new sportsball series that I could get into to break my book funk but this is a nope. It was published in 2019, a year after Long Shot so there’s probably some influence here given that the heroine is mixed like Iris was and August was the franchise player of his team. If you want to read a romance that has an HEA after intimate partner violence, give this a hard pass and pick up Long Shot for the OG. Thank goodness this was free and I didn’t have to pay for it.
We have Mia, who is mixed - she mentions being raised by her maternal black grandparents so her mother was black and her father was white - who left her husband Adam and Anton, who is her estranged husband’s hockey team captain. He fell in love at first sight with her over 2 years ago and had been pining for her ever since. Adam appeared to be largely emotionally abusive until she finally took Anton’s help and filed for divorce and that’s when he lost it and almost strangled her to death but she’s saved by her baseball bat wielding roommate.
Adam is arrested and when he’s out on bail, Anton follows him and beats the crap out of him in an alley for Mia and when he returns home bruised and roughed up himself, she knows it’s because he’d defended her honour, blah blah blah and was like, thank you. That was not the reaction I was expecting. Adam gets a misdemeanor, is released from the team and ends up playing hockey in Europe.
Anton’s crusty not-uncle dies of a stroke and the end.
I was hoping this was a new sportsball series that I could get into to break my book funk but this is a nope. It was published in 2019, a year after Long Shot so there’s probably some influence here given that the heroine is mixed like Iris was and August was the franchise player of his team. If you want to read a romance that has an HEA after intimate partner violence, give this a hard pass and pick up Long Shot for the OG. Thank goodness this was free and I didn’t have to pay for it.