1.75 stars - This is bad. 

I am a hockey fan. I wanted to be a Lexi Brown fan too. I really wanted this to be good it’s why I request an arc. But wow was this a struggle to get through. 

The main character was a caricature of what the author considers to be a cool girl. It’s mentioned multiple times how COOL Lucy is. Like okay? Maybe show me instead of telling me how cool and different and quirky she is. It was abundantly clear the author desperately wanted to be this FMC. 

Jaylen was the only redeeming factor about this book but only because he was sort of boring. I suppose she stayed realistic to hockey players but it all it’s ended up trite. 

I know this is being marketed as a queer book, and I’m not saying it isn’t. But man it would have been cool if all the queer characters hadn’t been boiled down to overused tropes. The gay best friend was sassy and mean, worked as a barista, and was the FMC’s sex confidant. The lesbian best friend was getting too serious too quickly with a woman who lived in her van. The last bisexual woman Lucy dated actually had a serious boyfriend the entire time and never told Lucy. Lucy (also a bisexual woman) herself is described as promiscuous and flighty in the beginning. It was like a running list of queer tropes with check marks beside each. I wouldn’t have minded one or two, but it truly felt like that was all she could come up with. 

I almost don’t want to even get into the dialogue and zeitgeist overload. I get she wanted to be topical and funny but at some point I started to wonder if brands were getting some sort of kickback with the way they were mentioned. Every other paragraph a nod to a current pop culture moment was shoehorned in. It was exhausting. The dialogue was cringey and elementary. 

I really expected so much more and was just disappointed.