Puck Me Secretly

Being a Vegas girl, VGK has made hockey a pretty popular and common topic in every day life. So color me happy when Chelsea Dolling's smutathon video introduced this book to me. The plot sounded absurd enough that I wanted to see where it went. And boy, it..... went.

There were some obvious flaws in the writing– the characters, even the two main characters, felt very.... flat and one dimensional. There were glimpses of depth to them, but not enough that I really became attached to them. You could have replaced Rory and Max's names with.. really anything else and it would not have affected the book at all, which is sad. The side characters, I felt, only existed as archetypes, stereotypes, and points to drive the absurd plot further. I'd say a good... 80% of the time, their actions were unbelievable, unrealistic, and, like I said, only there to propel Rory and Max to their ultimate finale. It also didn't help that everything, compared to the latter half of the book, felt slow in pace and then suddenly everything is a whirlwind of action and only to result in a dissatisfying ending. I like a sappy, happy ending as much as the next person, but for everything to go completely sideways and then be wrapped up in a neat little bow.... I don't know. It frustrated me.

Despite this, this book hovered around a 3/5 for me for a good 40-50% of the book just simply because it had sucked me in. There were glaring problems but I couldn't stop reading. But the last, I'd say 25-30% of the book pretty much ruined it for me and knocked it down. While there were unrealistic bits throughout the story, the latter half of the book cranked the surrealism all the way up to 11 and then broke the rating system. I would go into specifics because it would lead to spoilers for those who want to give this book a shot, but there are events that happen towards the end that just left me sitting there saying, “You really just threw everything at the wall to see what would stick, huh?” The latter half of the book was so incredibly frustrating and I actually vocalized my frustration, loudly, a lot, (much to the chagrin of my pets who just wanted to nap, haha).

The fact that I could not put the book down and it made me feel something at all is why it gets 2 stars, honestly.