Off the Ice (Juniper Falls #1) by Julie Cross – eARC Review

Publication Date:

February 28th 2017

Publisher:

Entangled: TEEN

All is fair in love and hockey…

Claire O’Connor is back in Juniper Falls, but that doesn’t mean she wants to be. One semester off, that’s what she promised herself. Just long enough to take care of her father and keep the family business—a hockey bar beside the ice rink—afloat. After that, she’s getting the hell out. Again.

Enter Tate Tanley. What happened between them the night before she left town resurfaces the second they lay eyes on each other. But the guy she remembers has been replaced by a total hottie. When Tate is unexpectedly called in to take over for the hockey team’s star goalie, suddenly he’s in the spotlight and on his way to becoming just another egotistical varsity hockey player. And Claire’s sworn off Juniper Falls hockey players for good.

It’s the absolute worst time to fall in love.

For Tate and Claire, hockey isn’t just a game. And they both might not survive a body check to the heart.

Review:

*I was provided a copy by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Once again this was a buddy read with Cristina @ My Tiny Obsessions so HERE to read her thoughts about this book :).

Guys, I think it’s happening… I’m growing out of young adult romances full of teen angst. I was really excited for this book and I ended up not liking it as much as I wanted to.

First of all, I didn’t connect with the characters at all and I’m sad with that because they could have had such amazing personalities and stories but in the end it didn’t work for me. Both Claire and Tate had a lot going with their lives and a lot of responsibilities but while this book had some difficult themes it didn’t work for me mostly because I didn’t connect with them. I also didn’t like them together. I couldn’t see the chemistry between them and I didn’t understand why they were together at all. Also, this was really slow book and mostly because there were a lot of things happening in a short span of time. There was Claire’s family problems, Tate’s family problems, Tate’s ex-girlfriend problems, his teammates problems, there was also a lot of hockey drama. A lot of things were happening and none of them really caught my attention and it sucks because I think some of the topics talked about are really important and should be talked about more but it just didn’t work for me. As I said before, it had too much teen angst and too much drama that for me it was mostly unnecessary.

Here’s another one of my main problems, while this book was told both from Claire and Tate’s POV I still think it wasn’t well done. They both had very similar voices and there were a few times that I only knew whose POV it was if I saw their names or the right pronouns to each one of them.

Overall, I didn’t particularly enjoyed this book. I just think it would have been way better if it didn’t deal with so much stuff and if it wasn’t so slow but if you think this is something you would like you should give it a try.