Audio Review: The Hockey Player’s Heart by Jeff Adams and Will Knauss ~ Narrated by Finn Sterling

Title: The Hockey Player’s Heart

Series: Dreamspun Desires: Book Fifty

Authors: Jeff Adams and Will Knauss

Narrator: Finn Sterling

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Run Time: 4 hours and 56 minutes

Category: Contemporary

At a Glance: I want to stress here that the main part of this sweet story is very, very well done by Sterling, but it hits a couple roadblocks along the way.

Reviewed By: Mike

Blurb: Hometown hero. Hockey superstar. Perfect boyfriend?

When hockey star Caleb Carter returns to his hometown to recover from an injury, the only thing he’s interested in is a little R & R. He never expects to run into his onetime crush at a grade school fund-raiser . Seeing Aaron Price hits him hard, like being checked into the boards. The attraction is still there, even after all these years, and Caleb decides to make a play for the schoolteacher. You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take, right?

Aaron has been burned by love before and can’t imagine what a celebrity like Caleb could possibly see in a guy like him. Their differences are just too great. But as Aaron spends more time with Caleb, he begins to wonder if he might have what it takes to win the hockey player’s heart.

Review: The Hockey Player’s Heart is the sweet story of hometown hockey hero Caleb Carter and his one-time tutor (and best friend of Caleb’s older sister), Aaron Price. Once upon a time, Caleb had a crush on his math tutor, but Aaron graduated and Caleb gave him a trophy and a kiss. One, Aaron remembers and keeps as a prized possession. And the other, he totally forgets.

Caleb and Aaron have both been out most of their adult lives, and they have both been burned by love before. This is a Dreamspun Desires book, so the hockey hero isn’t just out, he’s accepted by his team and his league with no consequences. If only this were true in the real world.

Finn Sterling delivers quite a good reading here with one major caveat, but more on that later. Every bit of the story I covered, as you would expect from this line, is filled with a hopefulness that our two main characters will finally get past their own roadblocks and give in to the obvious love and desire. Their first coupling is erotic, and even though the story doesn’t explain how such acrobatics are accomplished when Caleb has an injured foot he needs to protect, it is totally believable.

I want to stress here that the main part of the story is very, very well done by Sterling, but it hits a couple roadblocks along the way. First, Caleb’s sister is high pitched and nasally to the point of being hard to listen to at times. She is a school principal and just over thirty years old. By now, her voice should have more gravitas than a cheerleader at a game. Granted, not every man can do a convincing female voice, but going for the stereotypes makes it hard to hear the other good work going on here. Secondly, with all of the recent dust-ups about inclusion and diversity in M/M fiction, having a character with an ethnic name so badly mispronounced is, in a word, grating. Javier, Javi as he is called in the book, has a distinct pronunciation, but the narrator chose to speak his name as if it is short for javelin. It’s a mistake, one that took the big night of Caleb and Aaron’s first date and shook this listener right out of the story. Pronouncing a fairly common ethnic name like your Uncle Morty from the suburbs lands in the ear like a pothole.

I can recommend this book because Finn Sterling is far above average as a voice actor. I really hope, in the future, as more diverse characters are written, we can get past these small mistakes. They really do yank you out of the mood and the flow the authors create.

You can buy The Hockey Player’s Heart here:
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