Time to Shine

The problem was, Landon always developed crushes on unattainable people because it was safe. That way he never had to deal with the complications of that person liking him back.

This book is billed as “a merry and bright hockey romance,“ but honestly, I feel like at its core it’s a story about loneliness. There are definitely lots of bright and sweet moments here, and the story gets progressively happier as it moves along and the two leads gravitate closer and closer together! The happy ending came as expected and put a huge smile on my face, and there’s definitely an overall positive vibe here. All that loneliness certainly gets successfully overcome, but my, there’s a lot of it.

It’s a really good story about loneliness, though, and the different ways it can manifest. Landon and Casey, the leads, start off as basically polar opposites: Landon has long embraced his loneliness to the point he hardly notices it, just focused on the day-to-day business with a subtle undercurrent of self-loathing and not bothering to make himself easy to talk to. Casey, meanwhile, is constantly aware of his loneliness even as he tries to run from it, and he keeps doing all that bright, cheery stuff to avoid it, whether it’s pestering all his teammates at once to join him for drinks or forcibly inviting the new quiet, standoffish player to share his needlessly huge house for a month. As their different lives and personalities collides, they end up confronting all sorts of truths about themselves, each other, and their pasts, as one does, and eventually building something new and beautiful together.

There were some sections of the story that kind of dragged; the hockey parts probably could have been more exciting, and the side characters probably could stand having 1-2 more personality traits each. But overall, I really, really liked the main pairing and found this to be an interesting story. The snowy, icy, wintry vibes were very welcome in the current heat, too!