Book Review - Hockey Karma

Hockey KarmaHockey Karma by Howard Shapiro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Got this one off Netgalley. This is the third and final (I think) part of the Forever Friends trilogy by Howard Shapiro. The first book The Stereotypical Freaks was a fun read, that, despite its overly preachy sentimentality combined a sense of youthful innocence, camaraderie and music together with the woes of real life to make it likeable and memorable.

All that went down the drain with The Hockey Saint, a book that didn't know where it was going. It also introduced a new character who was uncharismatic and unsympathetic.

Watching Tom Leonard, our protagonist, grow from a happy young teen to a mature adult would have made for an excellent central plot, but far too much of the focus of the latter two books have been on other characters. Tom gets left in the lurch, developing a character arc through situations thrust on him, rather than through an actual narrative.

The art is clean, bordering on the unimaginative. This book suffers from drawing its female characters poorly. There are very few, and they might as well be carbon copies of each other - I mean, Felicity and Jaelithe would be impossible to tell apart if not for the hair colour. And there's some bordering-on-DC Comics-bad proportions in this book for some of the characters from time to time as well. Why can't female characters be drawn with some diversity in race, size, features and characteristics? Why is that always the problem?



The problem of music recommendations in a hockey book crops up here again. This story started with 'the Battle of the Bands', yet it's ended up being more sports-focused. I'm not bothered by the fact that there is a huge focus on ice hockey, a sport I know nothing about; it's easy to get excited by sports and understand the stakes, even if some of the technicalities pass you by. But, it doesn't fit with where we started; or where the protagonist Tom started.

Also, for a series subtitled 'Forever Friends' the friends from book 1 play no role in Tom's life. You'd think they'd have turned up, no matter where they were, when significant things happened in his life, and vice versa, but nope. The only Forever Friend we get to meet is Jake, who you'd rather dumb than keep, in my opinion.

This book tries to be as mature as its aged-up character, which works most of the time. There aren't that many neat bows tied up, yet people don't turn into hysterical maniacs when things don't work out the way they expected.

This book is a good effort, but too far removed from its initial story to seem like a fitting conclusion.

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