I read Game Changer. And I have some thoughts. It's not all bad, but it's mostly all bad, so strap in.
This book has two problems: nothing happens, the 'nothing' is not written well. Maybe stating these as 'two problems' is burying the lead...but it's the truth!
This book has a real problem with character development. Our main character suck. But also, there are characters that are introduced for no conceivable reason, names poured into the narrative the way your sweep all the pieces back into the box after deciding you're not gonna finish that puzzle. Hal Coleman is a great example. Hal is a referee mentioned twice by name. There's absolutely no reason for it. Who cares that this is Scott's favorite ref??
But you know, I would love to hear Scott talk with Hal Coleman for a while. Maybe Hal is a cool guy that I would want to hang out with. I'm a sports official, he's a sports official...You know who I don't want to hang out with? Kip Grady or Scott Hunter. Calling them blank canvas would be an insult to canvases.
Kip is one-dimesional until the last third of the book, where he a few good scenes with friends and family that make him more relatable. Scott is less flat initially, but only by way of exposition (page 29) about his hockey career and being closeted, and never grows. He spends all of his time doing hockey things - but there's never any description in Scott DOING his hockey things, no tension at practice, no injury, no homophobic comments, no secondary possible love interest, not even someone suspicious after pictures of Scott and Kip at the museum surface.
Sometimes, Scott opines on whether his relationship with Kip will improve his performance or distract from it, but we don't actually ever hear from Scott in-game on his own performance or how it feels. Since Scott is cast as a shut-in and private person, that would be the only chance for us to get to know more about him. And we don't. If we read about how their fight messes up Scott's game in the playoffs and how Scott gets so mad that he, for example, accidentally outs himself to a reporter or gets benched for a game, that would create more tension and make Scott into a real person instead of someone who sounds like an AI training model that will do what you want, but only if you say the thing you want over and over in slightly different ways until it finally get it.
And as if it wasn't bad enough that the characters don't have independent personalities, they don't have a shared one, either. There is nothing to connect these characters except sex. Any attempts at interpersonal development are sandwiched into throwaway parentheticals inserted as fluff to remind you that there is supposedly a real relationship here. And I legitimately question what they talk about, considering they seem to have nothing in common. This occurs all the way to the end of the book, as late as page 337.
Even having the throwaway parentheticals feels like it's missing the point. We have no reason to care about their relationship other than the sex, given how little we know about them. It's like...if you were making zucchini bread and in the center of the loaf you put a small zucchini lengthwise so that when you cut it, each piece of bread has an actual piece of zucchini in the middle of it. Why would you do that? No one actually cares about the zucchini. We know it's zucchini bread, you didn't need to put this here to remind us. Putting it here actually makes it worse because it distracts from the bread.
THE PLOT YOU BOUGHT THE BOOK FOR
But in the context of this analogy (which I've been told is bad but do not care), it's not even good bread. The sex is sexy, to start, but quickly gets repetitious, both in terms of the scenes and the writing within the scenes. I shall now talk about the sex in this book ad nauseum.
It's telling that Rachel Reid does not describe, really, the sensations that of sex. She is mostly describes the actions. Now, Reid has not had gay sex. But certainly she knows what sex feels like; she has two sons. I think the sex scenes could be more interesting if she described any of the feelings. (I actually don't think I saw the word 'throbbing' enough.) Maybe this is the third person problem. By describing things in third person, it's difficult to switch to talk about what people feel? But I don't think that's true. Why aren't we talking about someone's hole being stretched? Why aren't we talking about how tight people are?
Actually, it's really just the sex that isn't super well described. The kissing and cuddling is described pretty well, and the blowjobs are described decently, but the actual sex is glossed over. Perhaps Rachel should have pegged her husband before she wrote this book so she could understand this a little better. Perhaps she should have taken it from behind research purposes. I don't know.
Now, with sex comes cum. (I personally object to spelling it 'come' as Reid does but I have bigger fish to fry.) Never have I seen cum described so much yet so little. It's not exactly white, and given that its many appearances in this book, I would have appreciated this detail. There's also no one licking cum up. Why is this? I don't think there's was a single description of the taste of cum. We're always cleaning the cum off with a washcloth. Why is nobody licking it up? Additionally, we never hear of a time when someone's cum got somewhere where they didn't want it to be: the sheets, pillows, hair, eyes, etc. Furthermore, every load is described as a generous amount, shooting ropes. These guys are in shape and may have great sperm count and distance, but they can't always control exactly where their cum goes and its exact viscosity.
And another thing, the cleaning up is always a parenthetical. It can be part of the process too! Like, why don't we get any shower sex? Or bathtub sex? Scott's bathroom is described twice in the first 100 pages of this book, and then we don't hear about it again. Put it to some use!
Reid uses two awful conventions in her sex scenes. First, she constantly omits pronouns, like I, he, you, or that. Page 323 is a decent example where I think real people would use the pronouns. I've rewritten a paragraph with the pronouns: "I fucking love you so much, Kip...I couldn't do it. I couldn't stop thinking about you. I was so scared I was going to lose you." It reads just fine! I, as well as anyone, understand wanting to vary sentence structure. Repetitive senses are not super exciting to read. But given the repetitious sex scenes throughout this book, a little pronoun repetition would go unnoticed.
In fact, I think adding pronouns into these scenes at this point in the book would make it more personal! It would show the characters have a deeper relationship and are considering sex more intimately with each other as opposed to experiencing abstract sexual pleasure. It would show they are taking their time with it, understanding how sex is a part of their relationship as opposed to the only part of their relationship.
Second, Reid includes random utterances that you might hear during sex...but I'm not sure that you would hear them so much. For examples, on page 326: "I imagined kissing your beautiful mouth. I wanted so much... Fuck. Okay." What's with those last two words? It reads like someone receiving an unenviable task at work. It does not flow! The phrase 'so good' also appears multiple times per page during the sex scenes. 326 is a great example. It appears three times on that page alone. In fact, the word 'so' is everywhere in the sex scenes. Even if this is something people would say all the time during sex, I would challenge Rachel Reid to find a different word. Or perhaps an adverb? There are not a lot of adverbs in this book, now that I think about it.
THE REST OF THE PLOT (THERE ISN'T ANY)
So the sex writing is bad. And the sex is the first 200+ pages, and now we're at the central conflict in the book, Scott's coming out or lack thereof. It's all so silly and any normal people would've addressed it better than these two. I think they're both being big babies about it, Kip moreso. Scott has felt pressured to hide from the world forever. He doesn't know what's going on or how to address it because he's 28, never been in any long term relationship, and is not hiding himself from the world (not only his relationship with Kip).
Kip was starstruck at went along with Scott at first, which makes sense, but he didn't have to go so far. He put himself 'back into the closet.' He allowed himself to be Scott's lapdog - no one forced Kip to abandon his social life to only hang around Scott, not even Scott! If Kip had continued his normal social life, it would've made their whole relationship work just fine. They wouldn't have spent so much time together, wouldn't have said 'I love you' after a single month, and 'Scott's busy bc of the playoffs' thing would've been a non-issue. The whole central conflict was entirely avoidable.
The drivel that fills pages between sex scenes and the characters individually hemming and hawing about 'will they, won't they' is as uninspired as my morning oatmeal. For Rachel Reid's sake, I hope she freehanded all of this and never editing this thing as a whole. I've convinced that no one could take the outline of this plot and come up with a less interesting book. There are plot points which go unexplored and ones that are included but contribute nothing.
The most inane section is the incident with Frank Zullo, who gets kicked off the team after an assault charge. It has no plot relevance other than to put a new, hot guy on the team so Kip can say that he would really like to be sandwiched in between Scott and this other guy. It is the deadest air in an already boring book, framed like an important plot point but discarded for more bad sex. I was shocked that Zullo didn't come back as a villain, even if just to have a villain.
There are a select good scenes/lines in the book, none of which have to do with the sex. The primary positive is the callbacks to small details - the mention of 'sexy lumberjacks' and the bartender Kyle. These small elements are what make books good! Readers are intelligent - they can remember small details, and it's fun to spot the callbacks. But this book spends so much time with Kip and Scott both physically and in their own thoughts AND NOT TALKING TO EACH OTHER that it doesn't allow for many other moments where the callbacks work.
One interesting non-hockey devleopment is the bartender that Kip flirts with, Kyle, who takes Kip home one night after Kip has gotten very drunk. I was read, wondering: what will Kip do? Make a spur-of-the-moment choice and regret it? Go halfway and stop? Reveal his secret? But none of those things happen. Kip has to save himself for his boyfriend, Kip's contemptuousness notwithstanding. At least Kyle is a part of the most real conversation Kip has with someone other than Scott.
The scenes with Kyle take place at the Kingfisher bar, the Barnes & Noble, and an unnamed coffee shop. They are some of very few scenes in this book that take place outside of the hockey arena and Scott's apartment. The menu of options for these characters is more limited than those for Success Mode characters in MLB Power Pros 2008. These characters only operate in a few key locations, Scott being even more limited than Kip due to hockey. And I can't really see either of operating anywhere outside of their assigned areas. Could you imagine Scott Hunter going to the DMV? Because I sure can't.
But really, hockey isn't a part of the book either. The description on the back of the book, that it's a 'secret relationship romance set in the world of professional hockey' is stunningly accurate. We are merely set in the world of professional hockey. The final game in this whole book skips over the entire first and second periods, and reduces the third period to exactly one page. We could have had some real tension. We could have gone point by point through the final game and felt the tension with Scott. We could have heard him pour out his heart and soul into this game, face some real adversity, have some real tension, have him look up into the stands and look to Kip for reassurance, and then have him win it all.
But no. We can't have any nice things, because we spent too much time having sex. We don't even get to hear the crowd's reaction to Scott scoring goal to take the lead. It could have been a great moment, with Scott pointing up to Kip and being like, this one's for you.
There are, however, three good points related to the hockey in this book:
1. The use of Harv Murdoch as Chekhov's gun/token minority is pretty clever.
2. Scott on the bench for the final seconds of the Stanley Cup final - New York put in their defenseman and took their offensive players (like Scott) out of the game.
3. The tradition of shaking hands after a playoff series. I didn't know this.
But it's truly inconceivable that Rachel Reid chose to skipped over the emotion inherent in sports. This did not have to be set in the world of hockey.
This leads me to some general observations about this book's writing. I noticed that, when Scott goes to Kip's house and meets Kip's parents, Reid uses capital letters for 'Mom' and 'Dad,' which usually only happens when one person is referring to their own mom and dad. (She also gives Kip's mom and dad each a name for no apparent reason.) It's a small thing, but it breaks what I thought was a convention of third person writing. It just feels lazy, which is like most of the book. I was shocked to read, in the acknowledgments, that there had been not one, but two editors for this book. I cannot imagine reading the unedited version.
I also don't like the limited perspective shifts - they really throw me off in the beginning of the book. If this was first person and switching narrators, I think it would be a much more successful book. There is a comment early on, after Scott gets hit by a puck, where Kip said (or thinks) that 'Scott was tough, that he could take a hit and go in on the next shift.' I don't think we had established that Kip knew enough about hockey to understand what shifts and line changes were, personally.
Perhaps a symptom more than the underlying problem, I feel Reid overdescribes feelings and thoughts and should've described the physical actions in non-sex situations. The phrase, on page 330, 'Scott wondered if maybe they were done' would be better replaced with a description of the silence that passed between the two, or Scott nervously tapping his fingers, or something like that. Filtering the scenarios through the lens of our two characters leaves something to be desired.
Finally, a not negative, interesting note in the epilogue, on page 365. The line is: "he needed to get out of here, or make peace with the fact that he was going to fuck Kip against a wall in front of god and Ilia Rozanov." Please note the lowercase g in 'god.' I think it is interesting and also very intentional choice. It's perhaps one of the most interesting points of writing in this entire book. I can't help but think that using the lowercase g was a very intentional decision.
Final thoughts: the last third of the book is much better than the first 2/3. It is perhaps no surprise that the majority of the sex occurs in the first 2/3 of the book, and it's not great sex writing, either. There's no excuse for there being as little hockey in this book as there is. The omission of any description of the final game of the Stanley cup is glaring. There are legitimately good, albeit predictable, ways to increase the tension by describing the game and Scott's emotions through it, as well as Kip's reaction to it. There is exactly one issue in this book: Scott's coming out. It's brought up on page 29 and it takes the whole book (~370 pages) to resolve it. There is no other conflict, and within the conflict, there are no surprises, save for perhaps how quickly Scott chooses to resolve it after he decides to (but it's like water flowing over a dam - a little and then all at once).
Before reading this book, I never thought of any book as being the 'worst book I've ever read' (and I've read Atlas Shrugged!). Now, I have - it's this book. Nothing of consequence happens. It's poorly written, feels rushed, and lacks substance, like a Big Mac made during the peak of the dinner rush. The fact that it gets one episode in the Heated Rivalry series says a lot. Skip this one and save yourself a lot of time.
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
dededos
2087
theartofmadeline
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turnnoffyourmind
