Review: Brooklynaire by Sarina Bowen

Title: Brooklynaire (Brooklyn Bruisers #4)

Author: Sarina Bowen

Genre: Sports romance, hockey, boss-assistant, tech billionaire

Release Date: 12 Feb 2018

Author's links:

Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

Add to Goodreads

My rating: 4 Stars

Blurb

You’d think a billion dollars, a professional hockey team and a six-bedroom mansion on the Promenade would satisfy a guy. You’d be wrong.

For seven years Rebecca has brightened my office with her wit and her smile. She manages both my hockey team and my sanity. I don’t know when I started waking in the night, craving her. All I know is that one whiff of her perfume ruins my concentration. And her laugh makes me hard.

When Rebecca gets hurt, I step in to help. It’s what friends do. But what friends don’t do is rip off each others’ clothes for a single, wild night together.

Now she’s avoiding me. She says we’re too different, and it can never happen again. So why can’t we keep our hands off each other?

Review

I loved this friends-to-lovers romance so much. I have been waiting for Becca and Nate's story since we met them in the first book  and the long wait was totally worth it. It was such a fun, sexy story, with very little angst and a lot of good humour and intense emotions. I'm generally wary of boss-assistant romance but I think the imbalance of power was handled well here. It certainly was a main obstacle before the couple getting together but it was discussed in details and the solution they came up with was a good one, working for them both.

The story is told in alternating chapters of first-person POV of Nate and Rebecca and this is not my favourtie writing style but I got used to it pretty fast. We get flashbacks to their times together through the years written in a third-person POV which I found weird and not fitting very smoothly in the overall narration despite them being important and contributing a lot to the story.

I liked Nate, the geeky tech billionaire, hockey team owner, who has had feelings for his assistant for years and has kept them under lock and key because he valued their friendship and didn't want to risk ruining it and driving Becca away. Becca was fun and all kinds of amazing too, aware of her precarious situation if/when she starts a relationship with her boss. I loved how she came off as smart (despite never finishing college), how good she was at her job.

There is an easy flow to the story, a natural progression of the romance with a few setbacks, btu nothing outrageously improbable (probably except for the Alex plotline which went in a weird and unnecessary direction towards the ed). It's a true friends-to-lovers romance and we see so much of the friendship between the Nate and Becca before they became lovers and it also continued after that. The way the interacted with their friends and families presented their world as full and vibrant. Nate's AI project was hilarious and brought so much comic relief into some tense moments.

We see a lot of hockey action but the story takes a look also a look into the darker side of the sport (concussions and head injuries which were explored indirectly through Becca's fall on the ice and its consequences).

I have a minor quibble with the way Becca was presented as financially struggling which I found odd with her being the personal assistant to the CEO of a multi-million company. While I understand her difficult financial situation with her having to help support her family but it felt overdone and threw me out of the story.

The book ends with the sappiest of epilogues which made me so very happy. We get the perfect completion of the series though I wouldn't mind reading more stories about the Brooklyn bruisers.

Purchase links: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook