I went into this book blind, as I do with most books. I honestly don't even remember where I heard of it, all I knew was that it was a YA hockey romance. So imagine my surprise when I start reading and felt a brick-to-the-face sense of deja vu. I did not need to look at the reviews of this book to realize it was omgcp fanfic turned "original". It was glaringly, annoyingly obvious.

Now I love Check Please! I really, really do. It's one of my favorite pieces of media and I have read millions of words of omgcp fanfic in my time. But the fact that this book was so clearly an omgcp fic with the serial numbers filed off was by far my least favorite part. I never read the fic that this book originated as, but I do remember hearing others talk about it. I'm sure that if I would have read it as a fic I would have loved it! But I did not read it on AO3, for free, I read it for the ebook price of $6, and therefore I am going to review it according to the etiquette of original fiction, and not the etiquette of the fanfic world it originated from.

As a work of original fiction, this book felt incredibly lazy. I will commend the author for the Hell Hounds original characters who I found incredibly charming, but the main character, who was an original character even in the original work of fanfiction, just felt like a remixed version of Check Please!Bitty and managed to feel entirely unoriginal in his own story. Everyone else? Exactly as they were in the original webcomic but with a few minor details changed.

Even Kent Parson's Alexander Price's backstory was the same as it was in Check Please! It's literally an entire storyline stolen from another author—and while I would never call it "stolen" in a fanfic, when you turn it into a work of original fiction—that people are paying for!—I call it stealing. What happened between Price and Jack Zimmermann James Petrov is exactly what happened in Check Please with no real effort into turning it into something original. And don't even get me started on James, whose only difference from Jack Zimmermann is his new Russian ethnicity and his goalie position, and Cody, who is now just from Alabama instead of Georgia. Hell, the author even forgot to change a mention of Jack's "French-Canadian accent" to what should have been James' Russian accent!

Again, I would have enjoyed this if I read it as a fanfic. I'm not usually into OCxCanon, but their story was cute and I thought the romance, though a little rushed at times, was entertaining enough. And I also fully support fanfic authors editing their works to publish them as pieces of original fiction. But this is not that. This is not original fiction. Not when it relies so heavily on the existing characters and storylines of another author. Not when the author made such little effort into changing it to be original. Changing just the names and one or two minor details about the characters/setting is not enough to sell it as your own original piece of fiction. Even the changes that were made weren't properly taken advantage of! The author had every opportunity to use the fact that Price was a hockey player in Houston, Texas of all places as another reason why Price was so afraid/hesitant to come out, but since Kent Parson wouldn't have had as much of a reason to be as wary of the homophobia of Las Vegas, Price was not wary of the homophobia in Texas. It was just another name change with no thought into changing the substance behind it.

This review is already getting long so I'll just add another -.5 stars for a "won't come out of the closet/won't date someone in the closet" obstacle. This is a personal distaste for the trope, but why is it always the person who doesn't want to come out who has to compromise the most in these situations? Price has a damn good reason for wanting to stay in the closet, why is he the one who has to sacrifice the most when he is the one who has the most to lose? 

I love Check Please and the omgcp fandom, including all the wonderful works I've read over the years. I love hockey romances and MM hockey romance at that. I did not, however, love this book, and that's a damn shame. It could have been so good.