Comment: I can't remember why this one was in the pile but it probably has something do to with it being a sports romance in which the sport is soccer (or football as we say in my country). This sport is not the most common in romance sports but it is the sport I'm most familiar with since it's the main sport in my region of the world. I don't know all the rules but I understand it in general, I have this club I'm a fan of and I even watch games on TV of other clubs.
In this story we meet Camden Harris, a soccer player in a UK team who dreams of reaching the Premier League. Camden has a twin brother and three other brothers and they are known well enough to mean the media sometimes follows them. One day Camden has a problem with his knee and is rushed to the hospital where he meets dr Indie Porter. they seem to immediately be attracted to one another but Indie knows she shouldn't start anything for several reasons. Still, their feelings seem to progress very quickly but there's the patient/doctor issue and there's the problem of Camden's knee, which might cause him to not go as far in his career as he dreamed of. What will happen when work and health and emotions aren't as easy to deal with as they imagined?
This was the first book I tried by the author and I didn't end up being a fan. Perhaps this isn't the author's best work, perhaps not even the best in this series but what I've found here did not captivate me at all to, purposely, go on and perhaps tray again.
Once more, this is the type of romance novel which is told in first person in alternated chapters between the hero and the heroine. They are still young (in their 20s) which could count for some of their immaturity but he is a person who has a short-timed career, and she is a supposed genius who graduated young and that surely means intelligence. I have to wonder if youth here is the only reason why these characters would act so unlike grown-ups in relation to serious issues, and how they disregard certain things for s«the sake of attraction - at least until they admit they are falling in love.
Camden is a typical NA hero: sure of himself, knows he is attractive, likes to play soccer but in his downtime likes to hook up with women, has a pretty laid back life and his main worries, according to how the story developed, are mainly if he can reach his potential in the Premier League one day. I can certainly understand this goal of his, but as for his behavior and personality...he seems very one dimensional, with a mind track on only soccer and women and this made him look very unappealing to me. I wasn't that eager to root for him, let's say.
The heroine is a genius, graduated quickly, wants to help others, has parents who aren't around, and she dreams of one day having someone to love her. She is also a virgin who wants to have some experience with a bad boy before she is to find her perfect man, and her attraction to Camden seems to fit all the boxes, but of course she needs to not be his doctor first. This is more complicated then what it would seem because she wants to participate in the innovative surgery her boss will perform on Camden. Youth and a past without much structure might justify many things but I just cannot fully like a heroine who isn't a real professional.
Yes, this is a fantasy of a romance, in real life things might not be this way, especially with the fear of legal and libel cases suing people, but I was incredibly put off by how unprofessional these characters behaved. Both if them, although Indie's seem more obvious because she is the doctor who should know better, but Camden was pushy and didn't want to respect the situation they were both in. I think that I would accept this lack of professionalism more if nothing had happened between them until they were no longer patient/doctor, but the way things happened, I just could not be distracted.
The writing was quite juvenile and I can imagine this was probably the main reason for the way things happened. The first person narrative is glaring as not being suitable for this story because the sequence of thoughts these two had made them so ridiculous... if the story had been in third person, perhaps things would have been more interesting and it would have been easier or more pleasant, to discover the characters' inner layers. But no, everything was so... weakly presented.
As expected, a lot of the story is actually focused on how they can be together, how much sex could they have while still being only "friends with benefits" and should they meet here or there, would they do this or that... the soccer talk wasn't much and always related to Camden's knee so that part was a little disappointing. Then, there's also Indie's boss at the hospital, well the senior doctor who is taking care of Camden's case and who seems to harass her... one more element to add to the mix of unprofessional decisions which had been going on... and things just stopped being gripping. I was easily distracted by other things to do, I skipped a few paragraphs here and there until the end....
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