C+
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Fake Relationship, Sports
Archetype: Athlete
When I read the following scene near the start of Big Stick Energy, I knew I was going to have a good time with this hockey romance.
The captain, Eric (our hero) describes his teammates getting off the bus by saying “I watch as they file toward the front, a procession of exhausted millionaires griping like toddlers before nap time.”
It made me hoot with laughter. I thought, here was a sports romance that a non-sports fan could enjoy and that proved an accurate prediction.
Eric doesn’t date, he only does casual. Darcy, the team GM’s assistant, also only does short term (mostly because she picks duds). When both are invited to the same family/family-adjacent wedding, they decide to be each other’s date and act as buffers when their respective families become too much. It is the wedding of Darcy’s half brother and a close family friend of Eric’s. On both sides of the family, there are heaps of hurt feelings and shitty behaviour. Their arrangement escalates quickly into a fake relationship. Cue sexual fireworks and big feelings.
The truth is Darcy has had a crush on Eric for years, but never acted on it because he ‘dates’ models and other celebrities. She is (in her words) just an admin. Eric has been paying attention to Darcy for years though (he knows how she takes her coffee and what her favourite pie is) but never considered dating her.
The conflict between them is frustrating, mostly because of Darcy. Early on in the story, Eric and Darcy admit to each other that they’re crushing on each other. At that stage, Darcy claimed that Eric couldn’t possibly be interested in her.
When he is clearly interested in her, she changes her tune and is then adamant that nothing lasting can come from their fake relationship. She talks about the real perils of workplace romances and how she’ll come off second best if things between them go badly and the choice is between keeping on ‘an admin’ or the captain of the team. I would have liked more consistency on the barrier to them being together, rather than Darcy shifting the goalposts as they grew closer. But that might be a personal preference.
This is the second book in the series and the couple from the first feature quite heavily. I’m sure I would have got a real kick out of that if I’d read book one! I had no problems reading this as a standalone though.
There is a fair amount of spice in Big Stick Energy, including the lightest touch of role play and bondage. Sometimes Eric wiggles his eyebrows too much when he uses innuendo. I realise that is a very specific turnoff, but I’m a firm believer that eyebrow wiggling should be kept to a minimum. Naturally, your mileage may vary on this point.
While I enjoyed this one and read it (almost) voraciously, it didn’t stick with me long after I finished it. To use a common aphorism, this story was ‘here for a good time, not a long time’ with me. I don’t think this book will set anyone’s world on fire, but it is a very pleasant diversion.
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Man, there’s so much hockey romance out there – too bad this one’s just mediocre – a good time but nothing special!
Bowen is hit or miss for me, but I do think most of her m/m hockey romances (or her m/m romances in general) outshine her m/f hockey romances. Bowen’s THE LAST GUY ON EARTH (part of her Hockey Guys series of m/m romances) was one of my favorite books of 2025.
Read your review, read the book, and I 100% agree with “here for a good time, not a long time.” I read this book in one day because it was compulsively readable and enjoyable even though my brain was simultaneously critiquing the plot. I mean, are you serious that Eric’s mother
. This is perhaps the most soap-opera level plot point.
Oddly enough, the lack of truly believable characters is what saves the book. There are some really heavy topics that are used to propel the narrative forward including death, betrayal, substance abuse, and abandonment. But because the side characters and, if I’m being completely honest, the main characters, don’t feel particularly real or fleshed out, my emotions weren’t particularly engaged.
So go read this book. I swear it’s fun! It will keep you engaged for a few hours and perhaps make you, like me, join the bad decisions book club and stay up later than you planned. But don’t expect to learn anything or come away with a book hangover.
@SB Sarah – Not sure how I messed up the spoiler warning there. I was trying to follow the directions in https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/faq/how-do-i-use-spoiler-tags/. Did I use the wrong kind of quote character? Your FAQ uses ” rather than ” for the spoiler warning, so that’s what I used. But ” is what I get when I type the quote character into your comment box. I’m wondering if maybe your publishing software accidentally changed a ” in to a ” when you made the FAQ?
@SB Sarah – I hate to belabor the point, but yes. That’s what’s going on. All the straight double quotes (U+0022, https://unicodeplus.com/U+0022) in my previous comment on quotes were converted to right double quotes (U+201D, https://unicodeplus.com/U+201D) when the comment was published. I’ll bet that’s what happened when you published your FAQ. So when I copied and pasted the example from your FAQ, I got U+201D, but your algorithm looks for U+0022 to delineate the spoilerwarning.
I’m going to test my quote hypothesis. I’ll bet this will work:
I wonder if using the html code tag (<code>) would solve the problem of trying to describe how to do a spoiler. I think the code tag generally stops further rendering. I’m going to try:
If the code tag works above, that might be a solution to making your FAQ work a little better. Crossing fingers.
… and it did’t work. D’oh. What if I use html escape characters for the brackets and quotes. Maybe that will foil the spoiler and give a copy-and-pasteable template? Using your example:
Holy cow, can you believe that [spoiler spoilerwarning="OMG major spoilers"]
that entire season of Dallas was just a dream and NONE of it happened?
[/spoiler]
Success! Absolute last comment, I promise. Here is how I did it. HTML uses a combination of an ampersand, a code, and a semicolon to tell the browser to render the character described by the code. For example, " tells the browser to render an straight quote, ". If you google “html escape characters,” you’ll find lots of sites explaining how it works. Here’s what I put in the comment box to render a template for spoilers that can be successfully copied and pasted into a new comment to get a spoiler that renders correctly. I imagine this will likely work on your FAQ, @SB Sarah, if you would like to update it.
Holy cow, can you believe that [spoiler spoilerwarning="OMG major spoilers"]
that entire season of Dallas was just a dream and NONE of it happened?
[/spoiler]
Now I’m going back to reading romance rather than trying to remember how html works because it’s been a while.
Oh wow – the change in quotations might be a new development with newer versions of WordPress. Thank you for flagging this! I’ll update the FAQ.
Testing spoiler tags:
Let’s find out.
Thanks! Does it work?
The spoiler is
[spoiler spoilerwarning=" OMG major spoilers "]
that entire season of Dallas was just a dream and NONE of it happened?
[/spoiler]