It’s totally alien and Troy doesn’t know how to handle it.
To start with, Troy is bewildered by the vastly different atmosphere that surrounds the team the guys actually get along and seem to like each other, and the coach treats them all like human beings and talks and encourages rather than yelling at them all the time. So now here he is in Ottawa, where he’s sure that his teammates hate him because of his friendship with Kent and the similarly offensive behaviour and attitude he maintained as a way of keeping his sexuality a secret and to prevent his becoming a target of bullying by Kent and other like-minded players. (Although what he could actually have done is anybody’s guess.) Hurt, furious and disgusted, Troy loses it during practice and openly calls Kent a rapist the fight was caught on camera and the video very quickly went viral. Knowing Kent to be completely capable of sexual assault, Troy absolutely believes the accusations and is angry at himself for not doing something to stop him. After being dumped by his equally closeted actor boyfriend, Troy’s day went from bad to worse when he learned Kent had been accused of raping a woman at a party, but that instead of suspending him pending investigation by the team and the league, they were instead closing ranks around Kent and dismissing the allegations as pure fabrication.
Troy Barrett has suddenly gone from playing for the best hockey team in the NHL – the Toronto Guardians – to the worst – the Ottawa Centaurs – after a trade following a very public argument on the ice with his former best friend, Dallas Kent. It’s a lovely grumpy/sunshine romance combined with a wonderfully well-written redemption story that takes a really hard, unflattering look at the misogyny and homophobia that continue to exist in some professional sports – and potential listeners should be aware that the book includes a storyline surrounding sexual assault (none of it is on the page) in which victims are not believed and their experiences are trivialised. I loved Rachel Reid’s Role Model (book five in her Game Changers series) when I read it a few months back, and I loved it just as much in audio.
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