Games We Play

Yes, this is another read courtesy of Prolixity Julien, and a lovely one at that (you should read her review). Of the college age sports player related romance series I’ve read in the past month, these are among my favorites. I tried to review just the first book, but I couldn’t stop reading long enough, and then I read some other books, and now the series is stuck as a package in my head. I’ve gone through a full cycle on the series from “OMG! Great! The next Milan!” to “really? Did I just throw a Milan comparison out there?” to “no, I really liked them and the Milan comparison is complicated, but not unfounded.”

After a slew of books about regular girls and star athletes falling for each other, it’s nice to have a series where at least some of the girls are athletes in their own right, and not all of the guys want to be professional athletes. Bowen does have a formula – she creates strong personalities, takes them out of their comfort zones, isolates them, seasons them heavily with lust and desire, and then they fall in love.  She makes the formula work. The Year We Hid Away was rather over the top, but she still made it work.

The novella in the series, Blond Date, is the one that made me start throwing around Milan comparisons. In Blond Date, Katie has been exclusively dating football players to gain status points and to fit in with her sorority. Before the novella begins, the football player she had been dating tricked her into doing something and now she is embarrassed and afraid to face him. She confesses to her blind date, a basketball player (what a come down). Rather than judging her, he invents a game that allows her to interact with her ex and his teammates. I don’t think Bowen is as strong a writer as Courtney Milan, for the most part, but she could be. I think she is better with the sex than Milan, and she certainly has her own voice. Bowen’s romances are comfortably feminist. The right of self-definition and self-determination are important through the stories. You can tell who the good people are by their willingness to allow another character to define themselves. Whether it’s playing a sport, coming out of the closet, or refusing to be slut shamed, the defining moments for the characters are not the winning shots, but the acceptance of who they are as people.

Corey, the heroine of The Year We Fell Down, is by far my favorite character. She had been a star hockey player until an injury ended her career and left her in a wheel chair. She has an entirely believable mix of self-pity and refusal to be defined by her injury. Her desire for normal doesn’t always work out for her, but her refusal to be defined by her limits made me fall in love with her.

One of the things I like about this series is that the end of each book feels like a beginning. It feels like the characters are at the precipice of new experiences and will continue to grow. One of my quibbles with romances set in college, is that these characters are so young. At the end of some of the other YA romance books, I felt a little uncomfortable with how settled the couples were at the end. It was like they had jumped straight into middle age. At the end of Bowen’s books, I feel like they may or may not stay together forever, and that’s ok. They’ve helped each other become better people with more potential for the future.

I linked to a package deal to buy the existing books in the series, because you really should just buy them all.