Review: Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday
Published January 2024 via Forever
★★★

These days, Aurora's life is simple but solid: she teaches dance and makes complicated coffee drinks, she's (mostly) over the eating disorder that plagued her younger years, and she tries not to spend toooo much time around her mother. But as a teenager, she couldn't dream of this: focused on a ballet career on stage, and largely isolated from her peers, she picked a random cute boy she'd met and reinvented him as her Canadian boyfriend.

That worked well enough, and then she grew up and moved on—but now the real-life Canadian boyfriend has shown up at her studio, and everything goes topsy-turvy again.

I'm low-key fascinated by the way Canadian Boyfriend feels like an updated, smarter Harlequin. You have a dancer and a hockey player (classic setup), and some conversations they should have had sooner (classic conflict), and exes who are either dead or dreadful (verrrrrry classic; means that they can't compete for the hero/ine's affections), and a heroine still battling some old demons.

But the updates: Mike is a hockey player, and a good one at that, but he's not the star of the show—he gets it done but isn't the sole reason his team wins their games. Aurora has a ballet background, and in one version of her life she could have been a star, but...that wasn't in the stars (so to speak), and she's happier for it. (The book doesn't, for various reasons, wax lyrical about her dancer's body, which alone is a step up from category romance, and for that I'm grateful. Also, I love that she's in that sort of liminal space of food issues where things are mostly better, but there's a ways to go—it's a hugely common and important space but one that is usually ignored in favor of more dramatic moments.) I whimpered aloud when we got the first hints that Mike and his wife, who semi-recently passed away when the book opens, hadn't had things quite as rosy as they'd seemed (because goddamn do I hate it when the ex is both evil and dead; it makes me sprain my eyeballs from how much rolling they have to do)...but then things get more complicated, and we get both realizations from Mike and open conversations between Mike and Aurora about that marriage, and my eyeballs remained uninjured.

I do wish they'd had those conversations-they-should-have-had-sooner, well, sooner—although I can understand both why Aurora shouldn't have had to bring it up sooner and why earlier discussions might have inhibited rather than eased the way for their romance. This should go over really well with those who like their romance classic but...emotionally available, let's say. 3.5 stars.

Side note, with a side of cryptic: I did read the discussion questions. (3) This is one of my favorite parts of the book, because it happens so rarely in romance novels. (7) Not really, but when Mike jokes about calling Olivia Daughter, that hit me like a punch in the gut, because my dad (whom I called by his first name) made similar jokes. (10) Ball pits are absolute germ buckets, and I am sufficiently germophobic that I wouldn't be caught dead in one. Actually, if you'll excuse me, just reading about them makes me need to go wash my hands...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.