I gotta say, I don’t know why it took me this long to seek out more work from Sarina Bowen. She wrote two excellent novels back in the day (Him and Us, if you’re curious), and Understatement of the Year is no exception.
I was looking for a friends to lovers trope, specifically in the LGBT community, because when in pride month, right? Reddit did not let me down with it’s list of recommendations, and thankfully one contributor named this one. Truthfully, I don’t know if Bowen’s name would have jumped out at me, but they mentioned Him and Us in the post, and I knew I was in. This novel had a similar concept, though with all new characters. Johnny Rikker is the newest recruit, strike that, transfer, to an ivy league hockey team. It’s unusual and actually illegal to transfer teams in the middle of a career, I guess. I’m not up to date on any hockey rules out there. It’d all be fine and dandy, except his former best friend, Michael Graham is also on the team.
Rikker is much cooler about it than Graham is though. Probably because Rikker is now fully living his truth. At least to himself and his ex-team. Graham has decided to bury himself deep into the closet after Rikker got beat to a pulp back in the day when the two were caught kissing in public. Did I mention they were from an extremely conservative town? So yeah, Rikker certainly had a rough go of it and Graham had relegated himself to being a coward. I didn’t love that about Graham’s character, especially since he was the most awkward around Rikker when he finally came clean to the team about why he’d been transferred. Most everyone was supportive, but it didn’t come without any setbacks.
As I’m sure you can imagine from what I said before, this is a friends to lovers story, but first these two needed to just become friends again. And that did happen. Slowly. And then it was full steam ahead from there. But of course that road wasn’t without its drawbacks either, and there were many bumps before a happy ending finally presented itself. I definitely need to see if there is a continuation of this story in Bowen’s bibliography, because I loved this! It’s like the best of original fan fiction that’s out there, and I live for fan fiction. It’s nice to see these kinds of stories more easily accessible to the masses.