What a Hockey Rom-Com Taught Me About Love, Fear, and Visibility
It started with a recommendation.
A good friend at the office suggested I watch the TV show “Heated Rivalry.” I didn’t know anything about it but looked it up. Based on the second book in the Game Changers series by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry focuses on two rival hockey players—Shane Hollander (Hudson Willams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storie)—who fall in love over the span of multiple years. When I asked my friend why she thought I’d enjoy the series, she commented on my love of rom-coms, good stories, and great characters. Plus she knows how much I adore stories that elicit an emotional reaction.
All true, especially that last one.
I didn’t instantly jump to watching the show. I put it on my To Watch list. But then Stephen Colbert name dropped the show a few times and SNL did a funny spoof of Heated Rivalry using Harry Potter characters. When my friend followed up with me, I told her I’d give the show a try.
And I loved it!
Both actors are stellar in their roles, with Hudson Williams getting the nod for my favorite actor in the series. As good as the main story is, there’s a secondary love story that came thisclose to being my favorite. The main love story is wonderful, delightful, and charming.*
And I wanted to know how the story continues. Yet I didn’t want to wait for the next season. What to do?
Read the next book. And that’s when I discovered something funny.
The Power of a Book Cover
Reid’s Game Changers series features multiple characters and not just Shane and Ilya. In my research I learned that there were six books in the series at the time with a seventh later this year. Which one was the sequel to Shane and Ilya’s story?
Turns out its book six, The Long Game. Here’s where the surprise met my eyes: the covers.
So, the covers I’m familiar with are the ones in the Libby app and Audible. They are illustrated drawings showing the two hockey stars, drawn in a very rom-com way…just like so many romance novels being published these days (including my own). I kind of just assumed those covers were the only covers.
That would be wrong. Those illustrated covers are the second editions. The first editions are something else entirely. They are the covers I’m used to when I run across gay romances on the various online bookstores.
That’s a pretty sexy cover, but one I would have just skipped because of the content. I love romances, but up until the Heated Rivalry TV show, I had rarely ever watched a gay romance. Now I have. And I’m halfway through the audiobook of The Long Game, my first gay romance novel, and I love it as well. And I’ll be buying the third book as soon as it’s released in September.
Everyone judges books by their covers. And this experience made me wonder: just because of the first edition covers, how many other good books am I missing?
*Remember how I used “wonderful, delightful, and charming” to describe the TV show? Well, there’s a fourth word I need to throw in the mix: infuriating. Those first three words can describe just about any rom-com—including this one—and I use them regularly. Infuriating is a new one, largely because Shane and Ilya feel compelled to hide their love for each other. Ditto for the secondary love story in the TV show and even more so in The Long Game novel.
Both the TV show and sequel book deal with deeply loving relationships that cannot be expressed in public because of bias, prejudice, and fear. As a straight man, I have long considered myself unbiased when it comes to our gay sisters and brothers. But this TV show and sequel book unlocked something in me: it brought to the forefront, and in a very real way, how challenging it can be for our fellow humans to live their lives the way they want without unwarranted and pointless retaliation and judgement. I hope the popularity of the TV show and the book series continues to remove the barriers that prejudice put in place.