I finally jumped on the bandwagon that is the Windy City series! Slowly I am turning into a romance girly and sport romances seem the ones for me. Since this is also getting an adaptation, I wanted to read the book beforehand this time around. This book gets very mixed reviews, I’ve seen 1 star hate reviews and 5 star best book ever reviews. Where do I fall with this book? Let’s jump in and take a look!

ZANDERS

Chicago hockey isn’t complete without me – everyone’s favourite player to hate. I know my role, and I play it well. In fact, I thoroughly enjoy spending the majority of my game time in the penalty box before leaving the arena with a new girl on my arm each night.

What I don’t like is the new flight attendant on our team’s private plane. She works for me, not the other way around. But I’ll be sure to remind her of that, and I can guarantee, by the end of the season, she’ll be begging to quit her job.

But every road trip blurs the lines, and I can’t quite figure out if I keep pushing that flight attendant call button in order to push her buttons, or if it’s more than that.

STEVIE

I’ve been a flight attendant for years. I thought I’d seen it all, but when my new job lands me onboard working for the most egotistical and self-righteous diva in the NHL, I start to second guess everything. Including the promise I made to myself of never hooking up with an athlete again . . . no matter how annoyingly tempting he may be.

Evan Zanders is unfiltered, unapologetic, and too attractive for his own good. He loves his image, but I hate everything about it.

Everything but him.

This is a pretty big book with 600 pages and I would say there are quite some things you can say about it to! Overall I really enjoyed this book, but I wouldn’t say it was a 5 star best thing ever for me. I liked the characters a lot and both Stevie and Zanders had a lot going on so that made them rounded characters for sure. A mental health aspect is always interesting to me, but at the same time I was wondering if the book didn’t try to do too much. At times it also felt like love was ‘fixing’ the characters and I think that is very toxic. I think there is a fine line between someone inspiring you to make certain changes or helping you feel better about yourself and between so to say fix you. At some point in the book I wasn’t sure if we were on the right side of that fine line to be honest.

There was some conflict in this book that could’ve been solved with better communication, or any communication at all and that usually really annoys me. At the same time, I know I have experienced some conflict thanks to poor communication, so it might be more realistic and than we give authors credit for. Still, I was irritated towards the end of the book about the lack of communication haha. Both Stevie and Zanders were filling things in for the other that could’ve been avoided by asking like one or two questions.

Like I said, I did really like the characters. And not just the main characters, I also love the side characters. They felt like real people and not just the support cast. I am definitely interested in getting to know them even more and I am hoping one of my favorites is getting his own book. At the moment I’m already reading the second book in the series, with Stevie’s brother as the main character and with another character we meet in this book. I love reading more about these characters and I really enjoy interconnected series like this!