The Striker

I finally cracked open this book, which I got free along with my year-ago purchase of a Sarah Maas book (which I bought at the pretty decent airport bookstore because it's banned in Utah), so I thought this was going to be another YA book maybe with magic or werewolves or something. And it did start out with in a YA first-person style, but with an adult professional football (soccer) player (hence the title, so Striker is not some kind of wizard, dashing my expectations). Sometimes that style is very good (Hunger Games) and popular but often it is tedious (Twilight) and nevertheless popular (the author started writing during covid and got on the NYT bestseller list, so I guess I didn't spend that time wisely), but anyway, it's the latter for me.

In the preface where the author explains this is not American football she also says there's going to be sex, so I figured why not skim through before depositing it in the neighborhood little free library. I only spotted two sex scenes, or perhaps I should say sex chapters, and holy moly, if this is what the romance genre is about, then I've been missing out (just an aside, there's a new indie bookstore in Salt Lake City that's all romance books, called The Lovebound Library). I still don't think it's good writing, but all the energy in the book is in that blow by blow, almost clinical, narrative, though not enough to make me wade through whatever the plot is. I just realized that was my impression of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I saw they stockpiled at the public library, but I'm reconsidering donating this to the little free library (much as I did with the Sex Criminals comic book, which is very good), this is Utah, after all.