The six part serialisation of Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry begins in Canada on 28th November and it looks like it's going to be really good.  I'm fervently hoping Crave will find a European distributor SOON - I think it'll be bigger than Red, White and Royal Blue if it gets the exposure.

https://www.ft.com/content/9293facc-e8e7-44c3-b8d4-f240110a46d1

I was in Manchester to report on the growing popularity of ice hockey in the UK. North American ice-hockey games are watched by TV audiences of millions, but until recently most British teams have been playing to half-empty ice rinks. The Elite Ice Hockey League (EIHL) — the UK equivalent of the National Hockey League (NHL) — has no TV broadcasting deal, so audiences have typically been small and local. Most elite clubs share their ice rinks with skating instructors, who run lessons for children on weeknights.

It used to be unusual to discover ice hockey without being initiated by an older fan. You were never going to stumble across a game while channel surfing, or because it was on at the pub. In the past few years, however, ice-hockey matches up and down the UK have begun to sell out, and the new fans filling stadiums are overwhelmingly female. Overall attendance at British hockey games has increased by 75 per cent since 2010, according to the EIHL, and 45 per cent of all attendees in 2025 were women. And while there have always been female ice-hockey fans in the UK, women now buy more match tickets than men in some parts of the UK. The new season started last month, and the trend looks set to continue. Coventry Blaze, one of the elite teams, told me that 60 per cent of new season ticket holders for 2025-26 are women. The new female fans filling ice rinks have been led to the Plexiglas by a siren call.

This is a love story, and like all good love stories it is complicated. The affair between British women and ice hockey all started with a very niche genre of novel, known among readers as the “ice-hockey romance book”. Romance is a bestselling book genre in the UK and hockey romance is one of its thriving, surprising subcategories. There are thousands of ice-hockey romances in print, but the most famous novel in the genre is a 2022 book called Icebreaker, which tells the story of the romantic entanglement between a hockey captain and a figure skater. Icebreaker is set in California, but it was written by a Mancunian called Hannah Grace.

Romance readers have been a powerful economic force since the genre first gained mass-market appeal in the 1970s. Romance sales generate billions of dollars for the global publishing industry and the genre made £69mn in the UK in 2024. While fans are typically laughed at for their tastes (Mills & Boon editor Alan Boon said his industry “could take the place of Valium”), there is an increased understanding that these readers help keep publishing afloat, reading many more books per year than the average “literary reader”.

A few months after my trip to Manchester, I visited the UK offices of publishers Hachette, an imposing red-brick building by the river in London. I was ushered up to the top-floor café by Lucy Stewart, deputy publishing director at its Hodder & Stoughton division. Mile High, a novel about an air hostess and her hockey-star lover published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, has sold 125,000 copies here. Stewart told me that ice-hockey romance represents a rapidly expanding market, partly because of the dramatic possibilities available to an author who has an entire hockey club to play with. A writer can pen a series of novels, concentrating each book on a different player in the team, and there is also plenty of opportunity to explore various romantic tropes. (Whereas most novelists strive to avoid cliché, a quirk of the romance genre is that its authors actively embrace formulaic plot devices.) Popular tropes of ice-hockey romances include “Found Family”, where the heroine meets her OTP (one true pairing) but also gains an entire team of new brotherly protectors. There is also the more straightforwardly raunchy “Reverse Harem” ice-hockey novel, in which the heroine has not one boyfriend on the hockey team, but two or three. On BookTok, the wildly influential literary enclave of TikTok, publishers use these tropes to advertise to prospective buyers so that readers can select their next read according to a very specific set of preferences.

Traditionally, many of the most successful romance novels have been historical “bodice rippers”, their setting far removed from the lives of their readers. The same is true of the hugely popular romance fantasy “romantasy” genre, in which the everywoman falls in love with an elf, a vampire or a man who is actually a dragon. In A Court of Thorns and Roses, which has sold 13 million copies worldwide, the love interest is a sexy fairy. Hockey-romance books are strikingly ordinary by comparison. While the fictional hockey player might appear, at first glance, to be an untouchable sex god, he is usually revealed to be a kind of dependable boy-next-door character. A “cinnamon roll” in industry parlance, because he is as light and sweet as pastry. “It’s a form of idealism that is still in some respects realistic,” Stewart explained to me. “We all think that hypothetically we could end up with an ice-hockey player, but you’ll never end up with a dragon.”

I grew up reading Twilight, and on each film’s release day, I would take it in turns with my friends to embrace a life-size cut-out of Edward Cullen in the Odeon foyer. Part of the appeal of the ice-hockey novel is that you have the opportunity to go one step further. You can read about your fictional hockey player and then you can live out a portion of that fantasy by visiting your local ice rink. The relative smallness and shabbiness of the British ice-hockey league means that stars are available to their fans. Hockey players in the North American NHL can make upwards of $10mn a year, but the average British elite player is earning less than £34,000 annually. After the matches, these men aren’t whisked away by security guards. Spectators can linger by the locker room doors and meet their heroes. "

Some traditional fans aren't too happy with this:

"
Over the past few years, as more women have begun to go to ice-hockey matches, there has been a backlash from the established fan base. Newer female fans, in particular, are being accused of watching ice hockey for the wrong reasons. On social media, “hockey-book girl” has become a dreaded insult, and fans who found out about ice hockey through fiction are dismissed as “puck bunnies”, whose only ambition is to hop lasciviously between players in the league. I raised this with Paws, the Nottingham Panthers’ cartoonish mascot, who is something of an expert in ice-hockey fan culture, given his job is to wander the arena during matches riling up the crowds.

Paws, who asked me to withhold his real name, explained that the tendency among women to ask for signatures and selfies creates the impression that they are less interested in the sport than in forging relationships with the players. But he said he didn’t see these women’s behaviour as being all that different from the way fans have always engaged with their favourite players. “It’s slander, really,” Paws said. “I ask the players for signatures after the games. Does that make me a puck bunny?” On X, hostility towards the new fans has become so routine that one “hockey girls” group chat on the platform recently shut down."

"In March, I travelled to Nottingham to meet Laura, a self-described “hockey addict” who has read 220 romance books so far this year. Laura met me outside the ice rink. She had brought me a Nottingham Panthers jersey and suggested I put it on over my coat. Laura pointed Fossier out to me as he rolled around on the ice during the warm-ups. He wore body armour and a helmet, and with his hockey stick in his hand he looked a bit like a medieval knight at a joust. During the game — which was fast-paced and dramatic — Laura told me that while she started watching hockey because of her passion for romance books, she quickly fell in love with the sport itself. She has watched every Panthers match since, and obsesses over the finer details of penalty infractions and player transfer windows, like any other sports fan. The books aren’t the only reason why she would buy a ticket for a game any more, but they are an experience-enhancer. “The hockey book feeds into what you’re watching, because you kind of flesh out the players with the personalities of the characters,” Laura explained to me. Another fan, 30-year-old Jessy, likened the experience to playing with dolls as a child. The hockey clubs encourage this kind of imaginative slippage between real and fictional players. US and Canadian teams regularly publish videos of players huddled over copies of Icebreaker in the changing rooms. The NackaRockers, a lower-division team in Sweden, recently posted a video of their star players rating “spicy” scenes in a bestselling romance called Pucking Around. In April, the Sheffield Steelers put up a slow-motion video of their captain, Robert Dowd, taking off his hockey jersey."

https://booktrib.com/2025/04/14/an-elegy-for-the-duke-are-reports-of-the-demise-of-historical-romance-exaggerated/

Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club

“If you too have raced through Emily Henry’s moreish romcom novels, you’ll want to tune in to this new podcast from Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Henry is the first guest, along with director Yulin Kuang, who is bringing her stories to the big screen. They’re talking all things romance with host Danielle Robay, who will continue to meet authors in a series made for listening to in a sunny park.
Widely available, episodes weekly

Chance Encounters

A new series of the feelgood pod from CNN, about platonic and romantic relationships forged while travelling. Fans of Emily in Paris (and her jaunts to Rome) are sure to lap up the first episode, which is all about a charming love story that began at Trevi fountain between Catherine and Fausto – with Catherine’s mum in tow.

Widely available, episodes weekly

Outspoken:  My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan

by Sima Samar

My grade:  A+

There has been one truly worthwhile, significant book for me so far this year.  Outspoken is moving, sad and despairing but the book is full of one woman’s remarkable achievements.  And sadly, all of her achievements have been ground into the dust under the heels of ruthless, uncaring men.  Men who are dark, darkest beyond the dark characters discussed here in one of the Asks at AAR.

Sima Samar was born in a rural area of Afghanistan into an ethnic tribal group that is a minority and historically has not always fared so well.  An ambitious girl, she was at least fortunate enough to be born in a window of time in Afghanistan when it was possible for girls to be educated.  She managed to go to university and train as a medical doctor.

Dr Samar had a mission in life:  to help women and girls achieve a semblance of equality, climb out of poverty, to be educated and given life chances.  To have safe childbirth, medical care, enough food and clean water to care for their children.  To live a life that is open, free and safe.  She pursued these things through various efforts that included founding schools, medical centres and hospitals, human rights groups, heading up quasi-governmental organisations as well as dealing with all of these matters by asking asking for help from individuals, NGOs, charities and governments for help, money, support.  Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, this amazing and dedicated woman lost out to Barak Obama:  surely one of the most unfair decisions ever made by the Nobel Committee. 

Reading this woman’s story, I was simply amazed at her persistence, self-belief and confidence in the goodness of others.  She dealt with terrorists, ignorant, illiterate Taliban “chiefs”, Russian invaders, religious extremists, government officials in Kabul interested only in lining their own pockets and who cowardly escaped the ultimate collapse of any semblance of order, freedom, democracy that was achieved through the long Western involvement in her country.  I won’t dwell upon the politics of all of this though it enraged me.  Many Western governments failed Afghanistan but ultimately Afghan MEN failed Afghanistan and so have allowed it to drift into an endless horrifying quagmire of hostility to women, religious insanity and a leap straight into the hands of opportunist countries elsewhere not so friendly to Western concepts of law, order, freedom, equality.

Chapter 10 had me in tears.  In this summation, Dr Samar tells how in the aftermath of the mess left behind by the West, the Taliban opened the jails and let criminals go free, dress codes for women put them back into black sacks covering their entire bodies, female mannequins in store windows were required to have the heads cut off.  The police from the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (almost a laughable title yet a diabolically ugly, nasty and horrifying arm of government) claimed “The real cause of moral corruption is the face” – e.g. women’s face; how many men wear burqas?  If women don’t cover their faces, their male relatives face punishments up to and including jail and torture.  Women can leave home only when necessary and accompanied by a male relative.  Women are told to stay at home and those who are brave enough to gather outside in protest are jailed, physically punished or just disappear.  Women cannot travel by road or air and can go only 70 km from home and must be accompanied by a male relative.  Girls cannot be educated past grade six, universities are closed to women.  Women can work only in the health sector, banned from government jobs and female TV presenters must cover their faces.  In July 2023 women’s beauty parlours were banned.  The Ministry of Women’s Affairs was closed.  Women cannot participate in sport, driving lessons in many places are forbidden and public parks were at first segregated then women were banned from being in any park at any time.  And on and on it goes, changing at the whim of these stupid, risibly ignorant, uneducated so-called “religious” men.

Dr Samar’s final chapter is a brave and almost lyrically written philosophical outline of how a democratic, free and equal society could be established in Afghanistan.  It was like beautiful fiction after reading the darkest horror of a true story.  I doubt any steps towards her idealised Afghanistan will happen in my lifetime.  I see only sadness, recalcitrant Taliban control laying 100% in the exclusive hands of evil men with no concept of equality between the sexes, who are uneducated, worse than narrow-minded, under the influence of despotic, evil religious leaders and, sadly, the West is too frightened, too unbothered, too tired to deal with any of it any more.

This was a book I am not likely to forget.  It gave me pause for thought about how I and maybe others here view our romance reading which is why I decided to submit a review.  It makes me think how relatively shallow it all is but then I am so relieved that I have the right to read it, indeed to read whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I wish.  I am grateful.  I am in awe of Dr Samar and I bless her defiance.  Once, and possibly forever, living in fear for her life and that of her family, she is truly, magnificently a heroine for our times.

I recommend this book.  A difficult read, a hard read but an incredibly moving and important read.