It is a truth universally acknowledged that suggesting your very average hero and heroine were brilliant enough to influence Jane Austen in writing Pride and Prejudice is a bad idea unless you can match her wit and creativity. Unfortunately, Lia Riley can’t do that, delivering instead a fairly mediocre hockey / time-travel / Austenian book. There’s a lot going on in Puck & Prejudice, but only some of it works.

Tucker Taylor is a goalie for the Austin Regals, but his career is currently on ice. He’s on extended sick leave after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma during the previous off-season. Currently in remission, he’s still on the injury list and being forced to miss the rest of the season.

Tucker has avoided boredom by visiting his sister Nora in London. A nice night out at a pub ends in Tucker crashing Nora’s Mini Cooper into a freezing lake, where he seems to drown. Only instead he wakes up in 1812, with a strange woman pulling him out of the lake.

The amazingly-named Lizzy Wooddash is living her own limited life when Tucker crashes into it. Lizzy is a bookworm who dreams of a solitary life instead of the social whirl of the ton, but her mother is forcing her to get married anyway. She just happens to be at the lake when bam – there’s Tucker, very confused about why he is where he is.

Lizzy has a prompt brainstorm that should solve all their problems. While they try to figure out how to send Tucker back to his own time, he’ll pose as her fiancé, and eventually husband. When the time comes, he’ll go back to the future (!) and she’ll claim widowhood and thus her exit from the marriage mart forever. But, as they say, the course of true love never did run smooth.

This is light as a feather, but for all of its fun and funny points, Puck and Prejudice did irk me ever so slightly. This is mostly because Tucker feels like the most stereotypical bohunkular hockey hero ever, complete with the typical “good girl” semi-dom cooing during their sex scenes (he also nicknames her “Pocket Rocket” which made me think nonstop of vibrators). Lizzy and Tucker are the kind of people who have sex in a thunderstorm under a tree – but the author expects us to believe Tucker came up with the title of Pride and Prejudice!

Because yes, Lizzy and Tucker know Jane Austen, and Lizzy wants to write like Jane, and Jane is inspired by Lizzy and Tucker in several respects, to write her magnum opus. To call this punching above one’s literary weight class is putting it mildly.**

I liked Lizzy all right, and the romantic tension between her and Tucker is perfectly solid. The book is silly and tropey and charming sometimes, but it doesn’t quite have that oomph necessary to reach higher than a C-level read.

I still don’t get how the time travel mechanics here work, let alone why Lizzy and Tucker just shrug and accept his time traveling without thinking twice about it. It’s a turn-your-brain-off book for sure, but Puck & Prejudice doesn’t quite have the charm to pull off its lightweight ways.