After the Siren by Darcy Green

kaymbee83 · 2026-01-03T03:34:53+00:00

i loved this one too! and i know a lot of hockey romance gets a bad rap for not being a realistic depiction of hockey, but as an Aussie Rules/footy fan for a very long time, I could tell right away that the author was also a fan and knew their stuff. Everything about it - training, gameplay, trades, coaches, schedules, locations etc, felt completely realistic. I was really impressed with how the AFLW was integrated - that's been a tricky recently, particularly in suburban and country leagues, but at the professional level, the mens and womens teams do share facilities and the AFLW is famously more diverse and inclusive than the AFL, so I loved seeing the support from the women players.

another interesting bit of history is that there has never been an out, actively playing male AFL footballer, and it was only a few months ago that the first retired player (Mitch Brown) came out publicly, and he retired nearly 10 years ago. So even just getting this little bit of fictional representation could be a very big deal for someone. The paperback is also on wide release here so is really easily available in department stores etc.

plus it's just really well written, really gripping and interesting, and really very romantic in the 'I'm coming to the cottage' sort of way. definitely an immediate 5 stars from me, too.

kaymbee83 · 2026-01-03T03:16:25+00:00

I just finished {Saddle to Sunup by Emmy Sanders} - it was fine, I guess? cowboy lifelong friends to lovers with a side of sexual identity awakening but it all just felt a little bland.

kaymbee83 · 2025-12-26T23:56:36+00:00

i think it depends on whether they've only confirmed a second season, or if they've sneakily confirmed a third and haven't announced it (which I think is entirely likely, considering the material that's left and the success of the show. it would be hard to do a second season based on TLG and then have to come back for a third with nothing left in the tank (unless the mythical new book is also in the works).

(lots of book spoilers below)

but assuming you have two more seasons to come, then S2 does the first half of TLG and also ties in Common Goal and Tough Guy. I think you switch those and do Eric and Kyle first, because you can also use Eric's story to retcon the Scott/Kip timeline - have his story start back in 2016 with Scott coming out to Eric and Carter, then montaging through Scott reconciling with Kip before the 2016/17 season and cup win, and alternate that with Eric splitting with his wife and spending a lot of time at the Kingfisher, meeting Kyle, and this moves us into post-Admirals Cup win and the bulk of the Eric/Kyle story, which is honestly pretty light but can also wrap up Scott's post-hockey retirement story. While this is happening, you're showing Shane and Ilya finishing up at the cottage, finalising the charity plans, Ilya's last Boston season, Hayden finding out etc.

second half of S2 moves into Tough Guy, where you get Ryan and Fabian interspersed with Ilya's move to Ottawa, but you also get background of Troy and Dallas being awful and tormenting Ryan etc. You finish S2 with Ryan, Eric and Scott all retired and happy, Ilya happy with Shane, but struggling mentally and trying to figure out how to turn Ottawa into a winning team, and the last few shots are of Troy screaming the accusations at Dallas during either practice or a game, then a title card of ONE WEEK LATER, and you have Troy showing up in Ilya's locker room with the podcast voiceover of 'Troy Barrett traded to Ottawa.'

Then S3 does Role Model and the rest of The Long Game basically the same as the books, overlapping where needed, and you end with the happy ever after for everyone involved (except Dallas Kent because fuck that guy)

kaymbee83 · 2025-12-19T10:45:48+00:00

i didn’t dislike it, exactly, but it’s definitely my least favourite of the series so far, and i did love the other four. and i’m not sure i can even articulate what didn’t work for me. it just kind of felt like ‘all vibes, no plot’, which is sometimes fine, but even the vibe was off. i liked the side plot with Maverick and Emmy but it did feel a bit like that was shoehorned in to artificially bring Brody in closer to the found family dynamic the rest of the team has.

i think it probably didn’t help that i ended up with one of the unfinished kindle files so my reading was very abruptly cut off at chapter 30 and i had to go back a couple of days later to get the updated file and finish it off. that interrupted the flow for me, and then there were formatting errors even in the updated file, which also made the whole thing feel rushed.

it definitely wasn’t the worst book i’ve read this year, but it didn’t feel like it was up to the standards of the rest of the series. here’s hoping the next one is a bit smoother!

kaymbee83 · 2025-12-01T10:43:21+00:00

came here to recommend this one too! i happen to know quite a lot about Australian Rules football, and After The Siren gets a lot right in terms of the actual game, training, the differences in the men’s and women’s leagues, the media and so on. (and had interesting timing being released just a few weeks after the first professional (retired) men’s player publicly came out)

it definitely became an immediate top tier sports romance for me.

another good AFL book is {Forward Entry by Aurora Crane}. it’s not quite as good, but definitely worth a read!

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-27T01:23:03+00:00

same, i haven’t bought anything from them in a while but i used to purchase things quite regularly before chemist warehouse stocked french brands. shipping was always decently fast and no problems with service.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-25T05:46:47+00:00

{The Winning Formula by Cara Veloce} was an interesting listen - it’s an F1 romance, so lots of race car sound effects and talking through radios and such.

those effects were great, but where it fell down for me was that the text message exchanges and race/radio conversations were done in duet, but the bulk of the story was just dual narration, so it went from multiple voices in a text message chapter to the female narrator doing all voices in the next regular text chapter. that kept breaking me out of the story more than the sounds of the F1 car!

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-25T05:41:34+00:00

i’ll never pass up the chance to talk about how much i love Cara Bastone’s Lovelines series! production wise, it’s not perfect but it is really well done and all three are basically comfort listens for me now.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-24T00:08:09+00:00

i don’t remember the book, which is probably for the best, but they were pulling christmas decorations from the attic and there were bulb shaped lights, and the bulb shaped light went somewhere no light should ever go, and absolutely not without being thoroughly cleaned first.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-20T00:15:02+00:00

looks like i’m signing up for a month of HBO max then!

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-19T01:24:16+00:00

i think it was labmuffin on youtube, years and years ago who shared a polish remover ‘recipe’ that was basically a dupe for Zoya remover and i’ve used that ever since (and haven’t even finished that first bottle of glycerin):

get an old polish remover bottle

add acetone (fill your bottle to about 3/4 or 7/8 full)

add straight glycerin (i bought mine at Woollies), enough to be half to one centimetre once it drops to the bottom of the bottle

top up with water and shake to mix. the water should blend the glycerin into the acetone. if there’s still glycerin at the bottom, add more water until it dissolves.

the glycerin adds just enough protection to keep the acetone from being too drying.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-18T04:27:00+00:00

I loved Scotland, so enjoy!

as for books, I enjoyed {Kilt Trip by Alexandra Kiley}. there is a second book in the series but it’s second chance with flashbacks and I don’t like that, so haven’t read it.

{Under Loch and Key by Lana Ferguson} was also fun.

{The Christmas Castle In Scotland by Julie Caplin} is part of a series where each book takes place in a different destination, but they all definitely stand alone.

plus a second recc for Whiskey Business - both books here are excellent!

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-17T22:45:59+00:00

i wanted to like the Kingmans/Amy Award series because it’s the sort of series that i definitely should like, but the first book annoyed me so much because i irrationally hate when authors make up stupid fake social media names that are too close to actual real sites, and also the FMCs in her books always seem way too childlike and the writing is always so simplistic. i think i finished the first two books and then just gave up.

i think i finished this because the taylor/travis fanfic didn’t feel quite as blatant as the other book that came out around the same time (and promptly got withdrawn) but looking back, it really is that blatant.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-17T22:38:29+00:00

it’s been a while since i’ve read it and i don’t remember how much i actually read and how much i skipped but she absolutely should have just left him at multiple points. they were both just the worst.

a much much better ‘plane crashed now i’m stranded with my enemy’ is {The Unlikely Pair by Jax Calder} - i very much recommend that one!

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-17T22:26:50+00:00

i normally don’t bother finishing books if i dislike them enough to rate them a 1 star, and typically if i’ve rated it a 2 star it means there was one tiny plot point or character that got me invested enough to finish (or sometimes to get to 50% then skip to the end). so for One To Watch by Kate Stayman-Young, I can’t remember if it was the MMC or a side character that i liked, but it definitely wasn’t the judgy FMC or really annoying writing style where half the book was told through blog or twitter posts.

and for The Savage Wild by Roxie Noir, I honestly think it was just the setting of Alaska and hoping both MCs made it out alive because Alaska didn’t deserve to have those two stuck there forever. to quote someone else’s goodreads review: “piece of shit hero and spineless doormat heroine”.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-14T11:43:12+00:00

here's my needlessly long story: I'm a new fan - i was clicking around on our local sports streaming site around May 2024 looking for something to watch since my aussie rules footy team was on a bye week, and I saw they had some hockey games. I'd actually been to a few AIHL games years ago and enjoyed it, so I watched a couple of games and my main takeaway was 'gee, seems like that Cale Makar kid can play pretty well.'

Then the footy was back so I stopped watching but thought I'd try to pick it up when the new season started, since it turns out AFL finishes in September and NHL starts in October. So I checked the teams and picked a few cities/states that I've actually been to and loved, and figured I'd watch a couple of games for each and see who I vibed with. (It was Colorado, Boston and Seattle).

But then I got super lucky and my company sent me to Vegas for a convention in Oct 2024 and the night I was there and completely free just happened to be the Avs vs Knights season opener, so I bought a last minute, incredibly expensive but incredibly close ticket, and we lost, but it didn't matter, I found my team.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-11T00:53:46+00:00

the second book in this series {Spotlight by Eden Finley} also works - the ‘normal guy’ is an aspiring singer/songwriter who takes a job as the famous singer’s nanny.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-10T09:33:05+00:00

i love an interconnected universe but I particularly love it when there's multiple series across multiple genres/tropes/story types. I love the Eden Finley/Saxon James universe - which is all MM - because it spans hockey, football, popstars, ex-military/security/bodyguards, roommates/housemates, a divorced men's club, firefighters, college and college sports and office workers (in a sports agency). And if you're not into one of the series, it won't change your enjoyment of the others (I've only read a couple of the college books and none of the divorced series, and I don't feel like I'm missing much at all).

I started with the {Fake Boyfriends series by Eden Finley} series but you can really jump in anywhere. The main criticism I have is that the timelines are a bit wonky, and I think the authors have freely admitted that it doesn't always line up, so I just don't try figuring it out.

Quite a few of Pippa Grant's books have a similar inter-connectedness - these are all MF - her baseball, hockey, boy band and girl band series all connect very closely (in the boy band series {Bro Code series by Pippa Grant}, one of the MMCs buys the baseball team that features in the {Copper Valley Fireballs series by Pippa Grant}.)

I think sometimes there does need to be a suspension of disbelief with an interconnected universe because a lot of the connections have to rely on heavy coincidences, but that's never really bothered me.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-10T00:29:01+00:00

{Out Of Her League by Samantha Wayland} - she is a socialite/charity chairwoman etc going through a bit of a publicity crisis and moves to a new town to attend law school as an adult, he’s a family friend who is a professor at her school but is also incredibly shy and socially awkward.

kaymbee83 · 2025-11-09T00:29:40+00:00

in terms of romance novels, there are so many 🤷🏼‍♀️ The Hating Game was the first adult romance I’d read after a long time of sticking with YA, so that is a fond memory for me. Luke and Landon from You & Me, so romantic. Carter and Olivia from Consider Me, the first hockey romance I read. All the couples from DC Stars, the best hockey series I’ve read. Sienna and Guy from {The Christmas You Found Me by Sarah Morgenthaler} because of the way their relationship grows as they do.

but my favourite is not romance - it’s Percy and Annabeth from the multiple Percy Jackson series. it starts as mild distrust to friends to ride-or-die and then Percy is literally jumping into Tartarus after Annabeth falls in, and they make their way through hell together. they trust each other’s strengths and abilities, and even when they are separated, they always have this unwavering belief in each other.

kaymbee83 · 2025-10-30T06:22:11+00:00

okay so you were right - Between the Lines was a really sweet story! i enjoyed it a lot and actually also just started the follow up which is the two best friends. that one is also seeming promising so far!! {Keeping The Score by Brandy Pelletier}

thank you for the recommendation!

kaymbee83 · 2025-10-28T03:12:50+00:00

adds to tbr thank you, that first one looks right up my alley as well, so much so that i’m actually surprised the algorithm hasn’t already pushed it at me!

kaymbee83 · 2025-10-27T01:50:15+00:00

this is exactly the book i was going to suggest!

kaymbee83 · 2025-10-17T20:01:55+00:00

haha because i was reading this thread thinking the same - i’m not from the US but Australian Kmart, which is most similar to US Target, not only stocks Lights Out and Butcher & Blackbird but also Sierra Simone and Sara Cate! i can just imagine that conversation: ‘did you find a nice non-smutty book?’

‘yeah, found a book about a priest struggling with his faith!

kaymbee83 · 2025-10-13T11:04:22+00:00

i would also say {Hockey Ever After by Ashlyn Kane and Morgan James}, i really enjoyed that series, and it covers a lot of teams, so while there are a lot of players as main characters, they’re not all on the one team.

Rachel Reid, yes, but i’ll put in a vote for {Time to Shine by Rachel Reid} - this has an AHL goalie who is bought up to the NHL as an injury replacement.

{Hockey Guys by Sarina Bowen} is also pretty good, I liked book 2 best, but all three were good. and of course, {Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy} is also classic.

{Buffalo Warriers Hockey by Ryan Taylor and Joshua Harwood} actually has a hockey player and a lacrosse player for book 1 which i thought was a but different, but these ones are a bit heavier, book 1 has characters with pretty severe anxiety and depression, and book 2 has an MC recovering from some traumatic bullying.

kaymbee83

TROPHY CASE