Book Review: Canadian Boyfriend
You ever see a stranger in public who you find so appealing, your brain conjures up a “what if” scenario? In Jenny Holiday’s latest, Canadian Boyfriend, that “what if” scenario becomes very real for former ballerina-in-training Rory.
When she was a teenager working at the mall’s chain coffee shop, Rory had a chance encounter with Mike, a Canadian hockey player in town for a junior league game, and who Rory develops an instant crush on. Though it doesn’t work out, she seizes the opportunity to cast him as her “Canadian boyfriend,” as a way to compensate for her lack of friends at school and in ballet training. Years later, she gets the shock of her life when her former one-sided pen pal Mike turns out to be a very real human being, and also the recently-widowed father of one of the girls Rory teaches at the local dance school.
The two of them strike up a friendship that eventually turns into Rory moving in with Mike and his daughter to help take care of her while Mike is away due to his NHL schedule. Of course, the close proximity means that their friendly feelings start to grow into something more, but also something that becomes tough to navigate with Mike’s grieving preteen in the house.
Both Mike and Rory have a LOT of damage that needs to be unpacked before they can even think of getting together, and it’s refreshing to see that the book actually gives them time to do that. It’s also refreshing to see that therapy as a means of healing from trauma isn’t depicted as a band-aid solution, or a one-time thing, but instead an ongoing process rife with setbacks. Their romance itself is very sweet, and very thoughtful, which is very typically Jenny Holiday, and something I love that we’re seeing more and more in romance! You don’t need to be emotionally immature in order to have conflict!
As a total aside: as a Canadian, I got a huge kick out of all the little “Canadianisms” sprinkled throughout the book, and if it weren’t for the fact that it was -15c outside while I was reading, I might have gone to Tim Hortons for my large coffee with 2 creams, purely because of the sheer number of times it’s name-dropped in the book.
Canadian Boyfriend hits shelves on January 30. Special thank you to Forever for the advance copy for review purposes.