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★★★★★ 4
A sexy, frustrating sports romance that made me want to scream from the inside out!!
Format: Kindle
The Goal is an unpredictable, messy romance that follows a determined, headstrong, stoic law student and a sweet, laidback southern hockey player as they find their plans on thin ice, their goals suddenly beyond their reach. Sabrina and Tucker are two very different personalities headed in two very different directions. Sabrina has one goal... escape. The shame and the frustration of her broken, twisted home life has made her ruthless in her drive toward that escape, her academic goals providing her with the only way out. But that drive, that shame, that proud determination makes for a character that is so closed off, so hardened. She's the polar opposite of John Tucker, the sweet, loveable Texan who might be unsure of his immediate plans, but he knows where he ultimately wants to end up. Sabrina and Tucker thought they knew where they were headed, they each had their own plans for their respective futures, but when their lives tangle, the unexpected threatens everything.
It's a dicey move to take an unlikable character from a previous book and turn her into your next heroine. It's hard to sell that to readers who've been trained to hate that character by the very same author now looking to endear them to her. Full disclosure, I'm a reader that didn't like Sabrina before either. We weren't meant to. So, of course, I was skeptical that I'd come to want a guy like John Tucker with a girl like her. But while she's definitely a tough nut to crack, I very much appreciated what this author chose to do with this character in The Goal. Sabrina isn't like other girls. She's as unapologetically sexual as the horny hockey players in this series. She's as impenetrable and difficult and frustrating as NA male characters typically are. She's complex and fierce and she has priorities that don't involve long term relationships. She doesn't exude a lot of vulnerability or emotion. She can come across as selfish, but it's not in a malicious way. She's just a girl that has always had to look out for herself and put herself first because no one else ever has. And given all of that, I'd say Elle Kennedy has successfully turned a villain into a heroine, and she's done so without compromising the integrity of her character. I can't get on board with an author taking a character she once vilified and completely altering her personality to fit the new goal of the author, to make her the sweetheart heroine you wish your readers will suddenly fall in love with. I have much more respect and appreciation for Elle Kennedy's choice to ensure Sabrina is still Sabrina. And getting to know her in all of her flaws and rough edges and her maddening stubbornness, I can NOW allow myself to want good things for her despite being so frustrated with her, without feeling like I read a story about a completely different character than the one presented to me previously. This author gets an A for character consistency. A big fat A.
I really enjoyed this installment. It hasn't topped The Score for me as a series favorite, but it's a really beautiful, angsty story about finding new dreams, discovering all the things you want in life even if they were never part of your original plan. It's about deciding what's most important. It's about making the choice to roll with whatever life throws at you as long as the right person is there to hold your hand through it all. Sabrina is a hard heroine to root for. And Tucker is so freakishly nice, he's the polar opposite of the bad boys I typically fall for. But there was something so right about this couple. Even when everything was stacked against them, even when Sabrina fought so hard against the good in her life, even when Tucker should have probably run the other way, I wanted good things for this couple. I wanted their happily ever after. And Elle Kennedy delivers a really solid storyline that took me and these characters exactly where I'd hoped we'd go by way of the road less traveled.
The Goal made me feel all the things. As Kennedy's sports romances tend to do, The Goal is chock full of colorful characters whose banter had me laughing and sighing, swooning and smiling. This story is peppered with amusing moments, times of heartbreak, seriously steamy, sexy scenes and the most frustratingly maddening storyline of the series. And I really loved it. I love a story that makes me want to scream from the inside out. There's a lot of ways a writer can drive a reader to the brink and this story tested my patience and my tolerance in ways no other book has before. Sabrina takes stubborn to a whole other place and Tucker's patience with her was far more virtuous than mine. But as stressful and angst ridden and damn infuriating as I found their story, it's a deliciously satisfying, honest one and I really, really enjoyed it.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2016
