Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

Fate brings together a ballet teacher and a hockey player in this big-hearted novel about second chances and taking risks by the bestselling author Entertainment Weekly calls the "master of witty banter."

Once upon a time teenage Aurora Evans met a hockey player at the Mall of America. He was from Canada. And soon, he was the perfect fake boyfriend, a get-out-of-jail-free card for all kinds of sticky situations. I can't go to prom. I'm going to be visiting my boyfriend in Canada. He was just what she needed to cover her social awkwardness. He never had to know. It wasn't like she was ever going to see him again...

Years later, Aurora is teaching kids' dance classes and battling panic and eating disorders--souvenirs from her failed ballet career--when pro hockey player Mike Martin walks in with his daughter. Mike's honesty about his struggles with widowhood helps Aurora confront some of her own demons, and the two forge an unlikely friendship. There's just one problem: Mike is the boy she spent years pretending was her "Canadian boyfriend."

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The longer she keeps her secret, the more she knows it will shatter the trust between them. But to have the life she wants, she needs to tackle the most important thing of all--believing in herself.

Canadian Boyfriend was an obvious pick for me. At the lake in Ontario I go to every summer, I was in the mood for a constant flow of contemporary romance books. Usually, up here, I'll finish about three a day for the span of two or three weeks. Slather myself in sunscreen and plop in an Adirondack.

So Canada references, like Labatt Blue and a double-double from Tim Horton's? Gimme. I solely picked up this book for the title, and had no idea what the plot was, until I got to page one and realized it was a twist on the middle school cliché of, "I have a boyfriend, but he just doesn't go to school here. He lives in Canada." Clever.

The book starts with Aurora, a.k.a Rory, a 29-year-old dance teacher down on her luck. She's just been dumped, and is nursing a serious trauma related to her intense ballet training and severe mother. (Ironically, I've just read two illustrated-cover romances in the past 24 hours featuring an Aurora/Rory; I'd just finished Wildfire by Hannah Grace.)

First, we flash back to her as a teenager, encountering a hockey boy with a gap in his teeth at her job serving coffee at the mall. She becomes so enraptured with this boy and has such a distant crush that she starts writing letters to him throughout high school whenever she's stressed.

Honestly, I could have done without the entire letters plot. I understand it's where the sly wink of the book comes in, but it only serves to add a completely unnecessary conflict. (Mike Martin has a hangup about lying, but she's supposedly lying to him about using him as her fake boyfriend throughout middle and high school? Please.) Plus, it's frankly kind of weird. She's very into the letters to him, borrowing just his name and demographic ("Mike plays hockey in Canada") but otherwise knows nothing about him.

Segue to the present day. When she meets Mike Martin, the NHL player who's recently lost his wife in a car accident, he's bringing his daughter Olivia back to dance class after months away. He offers Rory a ride home, and the rest is history. He finds her refreshing and gentle, and he ends up offering her a gig driving home Olivia from dance practice. In exchange, she'll borrow the car she desperately needs. It eventually becomes a friendship, and maybe, more?

Overall, I liked Canadian Boyfriend. There was a lot of "playing house," which I do always enjoy even when it drags. This is where it got Hallmark-y.

There were a few call-backs I was expecting to surge up as tension that dissolved away. That's fine; I didn't really care. Still, I got the impression that Canadian Boyfriend{' '}skipped all the difficult bits of getting characters from point A to point B. I appreciated the amount of time over which the story unfolded—it gave their relationship history and familiarity, nestled in a routine that made it feel more realistic—but it meant the narrative also skipped around a lot. Certain developments felt convenient. For example, when the couple kissed or when they slept together, it all felt very sudden because Holiday seemed to skip over all the awkward, transitory buildup that actually makes up the bulk of most other romance novels. In that sense, Canadian Boyfriend could feel kind of jumpy and spliced at some times and too lingering at others. Still, I finished it in a few hours on a daybed on a summer afternoon, so I couldn't complain.

Canadian Boyfriend excelled most in very nuanced character worries. I thought it did a beautiful job capturing some aspects of gratitude and confusion amidst the grief of losing a partner, and how Olivia and Mike (always referred to as Mike Martin, never Mike) handled their relationship afterwards. For example, she had a hard time getting her homework done, and was struggling in school. New Years' Eve was bittersweet because he let her stay up late, which her mom never would have done, which they were both very happy about—leading to a conversation about how it was okay to be happy that some things were easier or preferred when she was gone, and that didn't take away from missing her. Mike Martin also struggled with realizing how much of the household burden his wife had shouldered, and his guilt over not being able to tell her once he figured out what she was dealing with; similarly, she was keeping secrets from him too that he could never confront her about. Overall, there were just some lovely and complex moments of life in there.

On Rory's side, this looked like her complicated relationship with food after quitting ballet, and how she's had to come to terms with essentially having been malnourished for parts of her life. The conversation centered around these types of issues was strong without feeling corny, and felt like complex characterization.

The romance was sweet. I did realize that she called him Mike Martin continuously after reading reviews where another person pointed it out, and then I couldn't not notice. Their hot-and-cold vibe was a little weird and complicated without really acknowledging how strange it was to jump so immediately into something and out of it, which kind of threw me for a loop. But all people and relationships are different, so it didn't yank me out of the story. Some aspects felt sudden with others overdue.

Canadian Boyfriend was so good with the details and nuance of these specific character sides that it did throw me for a loop when the "main" ending conflict was reintroduced, because I could have done entirely without it. But in my experience, that's where most contemporary romances either make the jump from good to excellent or falter. For me, Canadian Boyfriend was squarely good because it fumbled some on making a relationship conflict match everything else it'd introduced.

So. Overall, Canadian Boyfriend is a bit jumbled but a really good and sweet time. I'd reread maybe, but probably in winter with a cocoa, an ice rink in my future, and a Hallmark movie queued up on the TV. I'd recommend for a quick library pick in wintertime!

Best for readers who love:

Hallmark, duh. The Holiday, maybe? It gave me vague Gilmore Girls vibes too—maybe Gilmore Girls meets Icebreaker.

Brief book club discussion about the letters:

The letters plot felt so unnecessary. Aurora really wasn't writing to Mike, just a boy she named Mike in her head, so there was absolutely no reason why they BOTH should have treated that as such a dramatic reveal. She also could have just asked, "Hey, ever been to that mall? I think I met you. I told my entire grade growing up that I had a boyfriend Mike from Canada, and that was loosely inspired by running into a hockey boy there." It was not in any way what [object Object]been talking about, with having a hard time with others knowing "the idea of him" over him because of his fame. Also, I do think her reliance on this middle school binder of letters to a fake boyfriend was pretty juvenile to still have such a hangup about. Overall, just weird. Also, Mike Martin being strange about her lying when he lied to her frequently about little household things just felt mischaracterized. Random, but I also fully thought the grandparents would drag Olivia into a custody battle again when Rory introduced herself as the "nanny," because wasn't that a condition?