Ice Devils

Title: Ice Devils

Author: Ryan Taylor and Joshua Harwood

Publisher: Wainscott Press

Release Date: March 25, 2022

Genre(s): M/M Contemporary Sports Romance

Page Count: 247

Rating: 3 stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

Generally anything hockey-related and M/M is totally in my wheelhouse .... but I'm not a huge fan of "Ice Devils." Granted I have not read anything else in the hockey universe created by Taylor and Harwood and found it a bit frustrating that other Bethesda Barracudas players and their partners (who apparently each have a book about their own relationship) are all over the place and are very lightly explained. But that's on me, not the authors. 

Where this didn't work for me was the enemies to lovers premise, which moves from two guys who hate each other's guts (okay, it was funny how Blake refers to Mark Sakamoto as "Sakashit") to almost instant relationship, love and lots and lots of calling each other "babe." As Mark and Blake are in their early 20's, they pull some terrible juvenile hockey pranks on their teammates, and in this sense they seem young and unaware of consequences. But, in matters of their budding relationship, they are very introspective and measured, as if they were working out of some "relationship bootcamp" manual.

There is a HEA, and relatively low angst romance (outside of a huge "miscommunication / misunderstanding / just TALK to each other, dammit!" situation), so this may be a case of "it's not you, it's me" and I plan to read a few more books in the series to get a better sense of the authors' universe. 3 stars.