The Deal by Elle Kennedy — A Hockey Romance That Delivers Exactly What It Promises

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“I never expected her. Sometimes people sneak up on you and suddenly you don’t know how you ever lived without them.“

If you’ve been following along, you know I came to this series backwards — I watched the Off Campus show on Prime before I ever cracked a spine. 

And honestly? That might have been the best thing that could have happened to me, because by the time I sat down with the first book, I already loved these characters. I just needed to fall in love with them all over again on the page.

Spoiler: I did. In about 24 hours.

This review is focused on the book, though I’ll mention the show briefly where it’s relevant. 

Nothing major — but if you’re completely spoiler-averse about both, just know that the show and the source material diverge in some interesting ways.

Quick Summary (No Spoilers)

She’s about to make a deal with the college bad boy… Hannah Wells has finally found someone who turns her on. 

But while she might be confident in every other area of her life, she’s carting around a full set of baggage when it comes to sex and seduction. 

If she wants to get her crush’s attention, she’ll have to step out of her comfort zone and make him take notice…even if it means tutoring the annoying, childish, cocky captain of the hockey team in exchange for a pretend date. …and it’s going to be oh so good!

All Garrett Graham has ever wanted is to play professional hockey after graduation, but his plummeting GPA is threatening everything he’s worked so hard for. 

If helping a sarcastic brunette make another guy jealous will help him secure his position on the team, he’s all for it. 

But when one unexpected kiss leads to the wildest sex of both their lives, it doesn’t take long for Garrett to realize that pretend isn’t going to cut it. Now he just has to convince Hannah that the man she wants looks a lot like him.

What I Loved

Hannah is the kind of female lead I genuinely root for. She’s not waiting around to be convinced of her own worth, and she doesn’t fold the second a charming hockey player decides he’s interested. 

Garrett makes his interest clear fairly early, and she turns him down — and keeps turning him down — because that’s who she is. 

Giving in after a couple of attempts would have been out of character, and Kennedy knows it. Hannah is a tough cookie, and the story respects that about her.

Garrett, on the other hand, surprised me more than I expected. 

On the surface he’s exactly what you’d anticipate — popular, athletic, used to getting what he wants. 

But the details we get about him, his major, his taste in music, what he’s actually like when he’s not performing for an audience, make him genuinely dimensional. I liked learning who he was underneath the type.

The friendships in this book are, and I mean this sincerely, some of the best I’ve read in the genre. 

Hannah and Allie are a specific kind of female friendship that I don’t think gets written often enough — Allie is the more outgoing of the two, but she never pushes past what Hannah is comfortable with. 

She reads the room. She respects the friendship without being asked to. That dynamic felt really real to me, and I loved them together.

The guy friendships are great too. Garrett and Logan (John Logan, if you know, you know) go through a genuine shift across this book — there’s a moment where Garrett has to learn to actually open up and trust his friends rather than just exist alongside them, and that transition is what takes their friendship from teammates to actual best friends. It’s understated but it lands.

The spice is plentiful and it works. More on that in the next section, but on a pure execution level, it’s well-done.

What Wasn’t My Favorite

The third act breakup. I’ll just say it. I hated it, and I hated the reason behind it even more. 

By the time it happens, these two characters have genuinely grown — they’ve built trust, they’ve learned to communicate, they’ve let each other in. 

And then the plot engineers a conflict that requires them to suddenly stop doing all of that. 

It felt less like organic tension and more like the author needed something to gut punch us before the ending. It came off as more annoying than devastating.

The spice volume is also worth flagging — not as a quality complaint, but as a heads-up. There is a lot of it, and the smut-to-plot ratio is pretty even throughout. 

I personally enjoy spice, but I’m someone who loves a slow burn that earns the payoff and then moves on. 

Here, the pacing leans heavily into the physical side throughout the whole book rather than letting the romance build and breathe more. If you’re someone who likes your spice concentrated in the back half, just know this one is distributed more evenly.

The writing style also isn’t my favorite — and I want to be precise about what I mean, because this might actually be a selling point for some readers. 

Kennedy tells you everything. How characters feel, what they’re thinking, what it all means. 

There’s very little reading between the lines, very little space for your imagination to fill in. 

Personally, I like a little more room to interpret. But the tradeoff is that this makes the book incredibly easy to read, and I don’t mean that dismissively — I devoured it in 24 hours, so clearly something was working.

Vibe Check

Genre: New Adult Contemporary Romance, Hockey Romance

Mood: Warm, spicy, easy, feel-good with some heavier emotional moments

Read if you love: Slow-burn that pays off, healthy relationship dynamics, sharp female friendships, campus settings, banter

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Spice Meter: 3 out of 5 chili peppers (not for intensity — the ratio of spice to plot is the thing to note here)

Would I Recommend It?

Yes — with context. 

If you’re looking for an easy, spicy, feel-good beach read with actual romantic depth underneath the fun, this is a great pick. 

If hockey romance is new to you (it was for me), this is a solid entry point — the sport is present but it’s backdrop, not the focus. The college setting is cozy without being precious about it.

If you need your books to have complex prose, restrained spice, or a breakup that feels entirely earned, you might have some frustrations. 

But if you can meet the book where it is — breezy, warm, and unabashedly fun — The Deal delivers exactly what it promises.

Final Thoughts

I genuinely liked this book more than I thought I would, which is saying something given that I was already charmed by the show. 

Hannah and Garrett work. The friendships work. The campus setting works. 

And as a first hockey romance, it made me want to immediately keep reading — which, as the first book in a series, is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Coming into it from the show gave me a fun lens too — there are differences worth talking about, and I have a whole separate post planned on the adaptation vs. the books if you want to go deeper on that.

If you’ve read The Deal, I’d love to know what you thought of the third act — was the breakup as frustrating for you as it was for me, or did it work better than I’m giving it credit for? Drop it in the comments.

Looking for an MMC similar to Garrett? If you haven’t met him already, check out Cassian next.