Book 2: Take Your Eye Off the Puck by Greg Wyshynski

In the past year or so, I started watching hockey again. It had been a sport I watched with friends in high school (and I played street hockey very badly with the same friends), but last season I started watching it again much more frequently and intensely. At a certain point, I realized that while I knew the basic rules of the game and had a pretty good idea of what was bad vs. what was good, I was missing a lot of the nuance. So I started listening to podcasts and reading articles on tactics and hockey stats, and that was how I heard about this book.

Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.

Grade: A

Book 1: Abroad by Liz Jacobs (Book 1)

Note: I know the author of this book socially and read and provided feedback on an early draft of this novel.

As is probably implied by the above, I am too close to this book to claim objectivity about it. But man, I love this book. It's the story of a college student during his year of studying abroad in London. Nick's family emigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was young, and he's been an outsider for all of his life. But when he goes to London, he finally finds his people in the form of a queer social circle, which is not the most emotionally comfortable way for him to find belonging, since the idea of being gay terrifies him. That terror isn't enough to kill off his attraction to Dex, though, or to prevent him from opening up for the first time to Izzy, who's having a bit of her own sexual identity crisis.

The story alternates between the POVs of those three characters, so you really get a sense of the entire world of their social circle, and all of the various personalities and emotional entanglements that exist within it. Part of what I love so much about this book is that there's a gay romantic relationship that isn't the only gay thing in the story--Nick and Dex aren't the token queers of their friends group, and it's not comprised solely of gay guys, either. There's an authenticity to both the complications of friendships and sexual relationships in college and the specific realities of queer social circles, and it's so nice to read a story and recognize the people and the conversations and what matters to them.

The same is true of the examination of Dex's experience as a black British gay man, which feels fully integrated into both the character and his emotional arc, and Nick's as a Jewish Russian immigrant who feels out of step no matter where on the globe he is. Following him as he gradually finds a way to inhabit himself fully is very emotionally satisfying. And Izzy's shock at discovering something new and unexpected about herself also rings true, as does the subsequent fallout she has with an unexpected person. 

I'm about halfway through the second part of this story, and I cannot wait to discover what happens to all three of them and the rest of their friends. With a lot of romance writing, gay or straight, you have a pretty good idea of how everything will end up, even if you don't know how they'll get there. I honestly don't have any idea how the story ends in this case, but I have complete confidence I'll be satisfied by it.

Grade: A