Books & Spoons Review: DELAYED PENALTY by Sophia Henry

She closed her heart long ago. He just wants to open her mind. Sophia Henry’s red-hot Detroit Pilots series introduces a hockey team full of complicated men who fight for love.

Auden Berezin is used to losing people: her father, her mother, her first love. Now, just when she believes those childhood wounds are finally healing, she loses something else: the soccer scholarship that was her ticket to college. Scrambling to earn tuition money, she’s relieved to find a gig translating for a Russian minor-league hockey player—until she realizes that he’s the same dangerously sexy jerk who propositioned her at the bar the night before.

Equal parts muscle and scar tissue, Aleksandr Varenkov knows about trauma. Maybe that’s what draws him to Auden. He also lost his family too young, and he channeled the pain into his passions: first hockey, then vodka and women. But all that seems to just melt away the instant he kisses Auden and feels a jolt of desire as sudden and surprising as a hard check on the ice.

After everything she’s been through, Auden can’t bring herself to trust any man, let alone a hot-headed puck jockey with a bad reputation. Aleksandr just hopes she’ll give him a chance—long enough to prove he’s finally met the one who makes him want to change.

---

---

I like to read sports romance for two reasons, for the sports and the romance. When both of these themes are more on the background on the book, my mind starts to wander and I lose interest, sorry to say.
Auden, the college junior, who has more going on in her life than most people accomplish through their lives. Yet, she is insecure. I don't understand why she kept saying all she was to her grandparents, was a huge burden, since I didn't get that impression from the story at all. The story is told from her POV, in first person. Yet I still had a hard time connecting with her. There are several things going on in her life, that I found hard to believe, and wasn't essential to the plot, making the story just feel cluttered.
Aleksandr, the cocky Russian hockey player, I actually liked. The arrogant, overly self-confident wall soon drops, and there's an emotional, caring young man inside.
But I didn't feel the chemistry, even attraction between them. They connected on some levels, like the language they shared, and the loss of their parents in tragic ways, and missing them. But I think Alek wasn't in the picture long enough for them to develop the relationship they were suppose to have, considering there didn't seem to be communication between them while he was gone.
I am sure there are lots of fans of YA books, who are loving this story, for me, it was a reminder once again why I normally try to stay away from the first person POV, and from YA books. There were just some events and issues that I found were childish.
So even though I like sports romance genre, I wasn't the correct audience for this story or the series, but please, if you love YA books, check it out for yourself.
~ Two Spoons

---