Collision (An MM Hockey Romance)

By: Sloane Fox

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The player he was supposed to hate becomes the only person he can't live without.

They've been rivals since junior hockey - Jax Mercer, Canada's golden boy, and Viktor Sokolov, the Russian outsider with nothing to lose but everything to prove. On the ice, they're competitors. In the dark, they're something else entirely.

When they're forced into proximity at the World Junior Championships, their antagonism becomes obsession. Secret encounters. Touches in hallways when no one's watching. A connection neither of them can name or deny. But proximity doesn't last forever.

Drafted to different teams, separated by continent and circumstance, Jax tells himself it was just the pressure of the moment - desire without permission, heat without consequence. Viktor, who has learned never to trust what he cannot control, buries it deeper.

Then the trade happens. Same team. Same city. The collision they thought they'd escaped becomes inevitable.

On the ice, their chemistry is undeniable - a pairing so synchronized it borders on supernatural. Off the ice, they're forced to confront what they've been hiding: a need for each other that rivals their ambition, a connection forged in secrecy that neither of them knows how to survive.

Because this time, there's no distance to protect them. No separation to make forgetting possible. Just the terrible, irresistible gravity of two people who can't stay away, even when staying close might destroy them both.

do what now?

in the closing note, the author claims to "write outside the mainstream." I had not intended to comment before I heard that claim, but it is simply too ludicrous to ignore.

This book is not out of the mainstream. It is so deeply within every tedious trope of the mainstream in this subgenre that it may well qualify as plagiarism, though applying that charge rigorously in these environs would raze a desolation with physivs-defying speed.

There is, I'd estimate (and back with a significant wager) nothing material anywhere in this book that is in any way new, while I expect that perhaps 80 percent of it appears in 80 percent of the books in this inexplicable field -- in which authors write books that all-but-all tediously embrace every tenet of the "woke" left agenda they can shoehorn into books about young men's love for and sex with one another in an astonishingly narrow few ways, none of which bear any meaningful relation to the lived lives of the subjects. What, of course, makes this conduct more culpable than merely committing offenses against creativity and patience is the fact that the vast majority of the authors are women or have as the author adopted novel constructs generated (or recognized, etc) by the left/woke ideology that the authors rhetorically tout.

I need hardly belabor the punchline: what these authors are doing in their authorship is hard core cultural appropriation, erasure, silencing and deplatforming by their very own lights.

Funny how no one has written a book in which the woke characters fight *that* evil in this context. You want to be even a bit out of the mainstream of the subgenre, author? Write a novel that accurately captures how young gay athletes talk, think, interact -- and conduct their sex lives. That would tell a story no "m/m" writers appears to have any notion of or to give a hoot in hell about. And were you also to grapple with the wrongfulness under your own worldview of the very text you'd written about wrong -- hell, then you'd be on pretty novel and interesting ground in what would be, of course, your last work in this subgenre.

But until then, please do not flatter yourself to be doing anything daring, outre or even interesting. Do you have any idea how many books wholly indistinguishable from this one have been cranked out of late?
Or have been showcased in other media form? Or are hockey based? Or have a Russian and a half-Kor.... Oy.

As I said, I hadn't intended to write a review, given the nature it must necessarily have taken. But boy-howdy did you frankly beg for this one.