Disclosure: this post may contain affiliate links. That means if you click that link and make a purchase I may receive a commission at no cost to you. This book was given to me for free from NetGalley, however, all opinions are my own.
Author
Jenny Holiday is a USA Today Best Selling Author who grew up in Minnesota but is currently living in Ontario, Canada. Her wonderful books have been featured in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and The Washington Post. Jenny loves writing and started in the forth grade when a teacher gave her a notebook to fill with great stories. Her hobbies include of course, writing, hiking, themed parties, and watching people sing karaoke.
Plot
This beautiful romance story follows Aurora, who comes face to face once again with the Canadian hockey player she made up as a teenager. She did meet him briefly when she was a teenager and decided he would be a great excuse when she wasn’t fitting in at school. For instance, ‘sorry, I can’t go to prom. I’m vising my Canadian boyfriend.’ The lie didn’t matter though. He lived in Canada, she’d never see him again. Until she did.
Pro hockey player Mike Martin is trying to get his life back together after the passing of his wife Sarah. His plan is to return to pro hockey and when he finds out Aurora is one of the only people his daughter Olivia likes, he proposes she be their pseudo nanny to help them through while he’s working. To his surprise, she’s exactly what he needed too. She really gets Mike Martin the person, not Mike Martin the hockey player.
This secret Aurora’s holing onto risks tearing apart the setup they’ve made work so well for all three of them.
Quotes
“As much as I didn’t like the idea of being bad at something, I liked even less the idea of myself as frozen in times, unable or unwilling to evolve.”
“I was coming to understand that my peacekeeping had been about my fear of losing people-maybe I wasn’t so much a peacekeeper as a people-keeper.”
My Review
Overall I really enjoyed this book. It did start a little slow for me and I was wanting to get to the feelings Mike Martin and Aurora would have for each other sooner. They both seemed to deny it longer than I anticipated. I liked how prevalent therapy was in this book. It’s nice to see how it helped them in very different situations. I wasn’t a big fan of the reaction to Aurora’s letters to the fake boyfriend she invented, however, this doesn’t take away from my like of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to hockey romance lovers. However, there’s isn’t much of a hockey aspect to it other than it being mentioned that it’s Mike Martin’s profession. I would rate this book a 4/5.
And that’s the end of my Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday book review. If you read this book let me know in the comments what you thought of it. If you’re looking for other books to read check out these reviews: Every Summer After, Any Trope But You, and Beneath The Hood.
