Summary

An ultimatum from her professor thrusts Summer Preston into an unexpected collision with hockey captain Aiden Crawford. She’s caught in a delicate balance between fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a sport psychologist and veering far away from this god-awful sport.

For Aiden Crawford, being the captain of the college hockey team has its perks, except when a reckless mistake by his team threatens to jeopardize their entire season. Consequently, his coach nominates him as the subject of a research paper. It's the last thing he wants to do, especially since the girl leading the project looks like she could wield his skates as a weapon.

Summer can't stand his blasé approach to life, and Aiden doesn't understand her uptight, scheduled one. They are off to a rocky start, and provoking each other is what they do best, but defeat isn't something either of them is willing to accept.

Review

I am pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed Collide. Recently there has been an increased desire for hockey books. This can be traced back to Tiktok, and because of this—it seems like almost all sport romances are about hockey. We have unfortunately fallen into a pattern of all romances following the same formula, and it’s starting to feel that authors are adding tropes because they know that readers will eat them up. The tropes are starting to feel repetitive and ineffective. I was fully expecting Collide to be a disappointment. But why did I pick it up? Because I love a good cover, and this cover was too cute. I was fully expecting this to fall into the same hockey star and smart girl trope that are filling the market.

Yes, it did feel tropey and cliché at times, but I absolutely enjoyed this. I found Aiden and Summer to be swoony worthy main characters. They both were charming, and played off each other well. There was a lot of back and forth with them in the beginning, but that aspect didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the story. I actually found it to work. And I thought that Summer’s hesitation with the romance was relatable given her past.

There were several grammatical errors throughout this book. I normally don’t point them out because I normally don’t notice them. However, I caught them every time. By no means did it hinder my reading experience. I still very much enjoyed the book, I just wish that it had gone through another round of editing. Another issue I had was the timeline. At times it was hard to understand when something was happening. It often felt unorganized and at times I would have to go back and re-read it to see if I missed something.

Final Thoughts

Collide can be categorized as yet another hockey book that follows the same plot as several others. However, the selling point of this book is Aiden and Summer. They exceeded my expectations, and despite plot errors and grammatical errors, they sell this book. There were so many times I would read something with a smile on my face.

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