Hosting her brother’s wedding for an MVP guest list is the challenge of Jess Canning’s life. Already the family screw-up, she can’t afford to fail. And nobody (nobody!) can learn of the colossal mistake she made with the best man during a weak moment last spring. It was wrong, and there will not be a repeat. Absolutely not. Even if he is the sexiest thing on two legs.

Blake Riley sees the wedding as fate’s gift to him. Jess is the maid of honor and he’s the best man? Let the games begin. So what if he’s facing a little (fine, a lot) of resistance? He just needs to convince the stubborn blonde that he’s really a good boy with a bad rap. Luckily, every professional hockey player knows that you’ve got to make an effort if you want to score.

But Jess has more pressing issues to deal with than sexy-times with a giant man-child. Such as: Will the ceremony start on time, even though someone got grandma drunk? Does glitter ever belong at a wedding? And is it wrong to murder the best man?

Caution: May cause accidental aspiration of tea or coffee. Do not read in a public place where loud laughter is inappropriate. Contains hot but hilarious hockey players, puppy cuddling and a snarky pair of underwear.

Jess is reinventing herself and starting a new career. Feeling like the black sheep failure of the Canning family, she worries about what those she loves will say about her newest decision.

This book was just so much fun. Blake and Jess are both over the top in intensity and hilarity. Together their easy going, fun natures mean lots of laughs. Neither are fully comfortable with where their lives are, for different reasons, and those reason play out just as differently as their histories. Though Jess jumps from one path to another, she wants to find that thing that grounds her...she just hasn’t found it yet. Blake on the other hand likes to keep things light and easy to avoid attachments and entanglements. But each might just be what the other needs.

Blake doesn't have all fun in his past and has spent the last five years not letting women close as a result. Blake was always the fun character in the background of Jamie and Wes’s books. As their upstairs neighbor and with his enthusiasm for their friendship, he is always in and out of their apartment. Getting to know more about Blake behind his exuberant personality meant getting past the public image he has worked so hard to erect.

I loved the progression of the relationship between Jess and Blake. We knew these two were hot together -- they proved that when they first met. But as they get behind walls that others aren’t allowed to see, they each become vulnerable to other, even without knowing it.

This had me laughing with Blake’s antics. Nothing is serious when he is involved, but at the same time, he also knows when things are serious and has a deep sense of loyalty to his family. Since Wes and Jamie are his family, he is quick to bring Jess into his circle, even as he wants to bring him into his life in a different role. 

As the first book in the WAGS series, this has the extra standard of introducing some of the other single guys, in addition to showing readers all the sweet moments that those already in relationships (Wes and Jamie) are experiencing. For a first novel, it does a great job balancing the primary couple with the side characters in a way that doesn’t detract from Jess and Blake’s story while building the foundation for a whole new set of characters. 

 

I was gifted a copy in exchange for an honest review.

As the start of the new series that spins off from my favorite duet of M/M books, Him and Us, Good Boy is the next collaboration of authors Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy. Sure, it gives me the long-awaited wedding of Jamie and Wes from the previous two books, but it also contains the mostly light-hearted, fun, and often funny story that mostly lives up to what I expect from this writing team.

There is really only one word needed to describe Toronto hockey forward Blake Riley. He’s big…big physique, big mouth, big personality, big goofball, big cock (which has multiple nicknames in this story), and most importantly, big heart. All but one of these things (the size of the “Blake Snake”) we learned while he was a larger-than-life secondary character in Us, the same place where he meets—and subsequently has fantastic massage-chair sex with…shh! don’t tell!—Jamie’s sister, Jessica Canning. Whereas Blake exudes confidence almost all the time, Jess has an inferiority complex. She’s always felt like the Canning family screw-up. After planning the spectacular event that is her brother’s wedding, complete with the last-minute maid-of-honor stress caused by the best man (yeah, the one and only Blake), she puts the final nail in the coffin of party planning and decides to apply for nursing schools, and it just so happens that just days before the fall term starts, she gets a partial scholarship to a nursing school in—you guessed it!—Toronto! Cue antics and hilarity in 3…2…1…

I know Good Boy is Blake and Jessica’s story, but I must say this first. If you’re a fan of Him and Us, make sure you have some Kleenexes for the happy tears you’ll likely encounter during chapter four. Just sayin’.

I should also mention that while this review keeps mentioning those other two books, Good Boy can certainly be read as a standalone. While I can’t say with certainty, because I have read them (duh, in case you missed that), I believe these authors did a satisfactory job dealing with reintroducing these characters and mentioning relevant past events, namely the interaction between Blake and Jess during her brief stay in Toronto the previous spring. So yes, standalone is fine. But why? Seriously. I digress.

Because Blake plays such a prominent role in Us, those who have read that novel won’t get any big revelations about the type of man Blake is while reading Good Boy, though the event in his past that forms the bit of drama for him in the story does reinforce the reader’s previous knowledge that he is a caring man with a gigantic heart to match the rest of his stature. I have to admit, though, I was a little disappointed that having the first-person perspective of Blake made him a little less fun, less of a fourteen-year-old stuck in a hunky hockey stud’s body, to me than he was before. Of course that’s not entirely bad, but it’s something standalone readers might miss out on. In the same vein, while there are plenty of things that are said in Good Boy that made me laugh, I feel like the authors missed out on some golden opportunities. The biggest of these? WHERE is the sheep prank!?

Granted, the only novels I’ve read from Elle Kennedy have been the three collaborations with Sarina Bowen, but as I’ve grown to expect out of Sarina’s stories, the plot in Good Boy is simple and straightforward, free from contrived drama, and smoothly executed in a storytelling style that does absolutely nothing to hinder the reader’s ability to feel all the great emotions as they happen. The characters’ actions and responses are believable, and the characters themselves are likable and relatable. I must mention, though, that the flow of the relationship at times felt uncharacteristically abrupt. This might well have been a side effect of the fact that Blake and Jess are usually not on the same page at the same time as far as their expectations and their feelings for one another are concerned, but, for example, Blake being content to keep Jess as a friend-with-bennies for so long and then suddenly switching to can’t-get-her-out-of-my-head mode without there being some huge thing to trigger it made it feel like a jump to me. That’s a small complaint on my part, though, as it didn’t detract at all from my enjoyment of the story. On a similar note, some readers may find the ending to be a little abrupt, since it doesn’t contain a happily-ever-after and there isn’t an epilogue. I have a feeling this decision by the authors is mostly because of the nature of the series, that we’ll get more about them in future books, so having an epilogue would have messed with the chronology of the series to some degree. That’s just my gut instinct here.

I have to admit that I had been looking forward to reading Good Boy for several months prior to finally being able to read it. So did it live up to my expectations? Yes and no. I enjoyed the story and loved being able to revisit such great characters, but at the end, it felt like something was missing that I had hoped for, but I can’t put my finger on what it was. Even so, the answer to that question is much more yes, so I am also looking forward to the next book in this series.

All co-written books by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

The story of Blake and Jess gets its start in...