Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.”

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

Terrific duet narration including Joshua Jackson!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙❤️💖
Heat/Steam: 🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 😄🙂🥰☺️😋
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Duet Narration

The heroine: Aurora Evans (a.k.a. Rory) – she is a former ballerina who failed in New York and is now a dance teacher at a strip mall dance studio in Minnetonka Minnesota. Her mother was a typical stage mom, who had very high expectations of her daughter when it came to dance, she was very strict with her food, as is fairly common for ballet dancers and when Rory went to New York she found she was having anxiety attacks having to do with people looking at her and judging her. She recently broke up with a live-in boyfriend who treated her like a doormat.

The Hero: Mike Martin – He is a professional hockey player for the Minnesota Lumberjacks, and he has a young daughter that is in Rory’s dance class. Mike lost his wife, whom he really loved in a sudden car accident nine months ago. Both Mike and his daughter have been struggling to deal with their loss ever since, and both see a therapist. Mike is soon to go back on the road with his team since the season is starting, and he needs help with his daughter.

The Story: Years ago when Rory was in high school, she was a loner who went to school and practiced dancing all week every week, and she worked at a coffee shop in the Mall of America on the weekends. One day she met a hockey player from Canada named Mike who was missing a front tooth. She romanticized the meeting and started to pretend he was her Canadian boyfriend in order to get out of things others wanted her to do. She liked being a loner, so when someone asked her to study or go to a party, she had a ready excuse that she had to write to or visit her Canadian boyfriend. She even started to write letters to him and saved those letters as a sort of diary.

Years later, she meets Mike while he is picking up his daughter at dance class. He hires her to help him while he is on the road, by driving his daughter to and from dance class and help her with homework until the neighbor woman gets home. When Rory needs to sell her house, Mike has her move into his place to be more of a nanny to his daughter while he is away.

Though I usually don’t like romance books where one of the main characters lost someone they were really in love with, because they can be depressing and also because I like the two main characters to be the one and only loves of each others lives. Though this one was pretty good. It was a bit depressing at times, Mike’s relationship with his wife Sarah wasn’t perfect, so he was dealing with that as well. Rory has her own issues, which she was also getting over. Though I did like it overall and there were some pretty great references to things like the songs of the Go-Go’s, and how Mike and Rory got into watching old episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I definitely remember the one where Albert got addicted to morphine.

Another thing I really liked about this book was the fact that I not only got to reminisce about old TV shows and bands, I have a kind of connection to this book that also had me reminiscing about my younger self. Not only was this book set in Minnesota, where I live and grew up, but I, like the main character, met a Canadian hockey player as a teenager. Though mine came from Thunder Bay Ontario and I didn’t meet him at the Mall of America, but at my local hockey rink.

This audiobook was told in dual points of view via duet narration and was narrated by Joshua Jackson and Emily Ellet. Emily Ellet was very good, she sounded age appropriate for Rory and I really liked her voice. Joshua Jackson was terrific. He has a nice deep voice for a romantic Hero, and it doesn’t hurt that his voice brings back all kinds of good memories, such as Charlie from The Mighty Ducks, Pacey from Dawson’s Creek and Peter from Fringe. He definitely sounds like he is voice acting more than reading, which I love.

Blog|Goodreads|Facebook|Instagram|Twitter|BookBub

View all my reviews