Sean Ashcroft’s Cocky has been on my list for some time, as one of the few-and-far-between fruits of my search for gay romance actually by gay men. it has ups and downs, some of which are exacerbated by the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook and the reader was attempting to do Voices in a way that did not work. overall, though, it is charming if not especially sophisticated.
the protagonists are Eliot, an out, visibly gay reporter who is assigned to interview Danny, a professional hockey player who has just come out, rather spontaneously, on social media. after the article comes out — jump-starting Eliot’s previously stagnant career — Danny’s manager suggests that Danny contract Eliot as a fake boyfriend to help him drum up corporate sponsorships. obviously they very quickly start actually having feelings for each other, and it’s ultimately revealed that the manager set the whole thing up as cover for his extensive embezzlement from Danny and from the team as a whole.
just to get this part out of the way: Eliot is originally from Maine, and the audiobook reader attempts to give him a Maine accent, which ends up vacillating wildly between sounding Australian and sounding like a jaded 1940s investigative journalist. rarely does it actually approximate an actual Maine accent (an accent I think someone whose mother named him after T.S. Eliot in the early ’90s is probably unlikely to have, anyway), and across the board it is deeply jarring. Danny, meanwhile, is given a voice that largely sounds like a man in his late 70s on his deathbed, which is particularly jarring but also funny during the sex scenes. I also didn’t love the reader’s phrasing choices, but the voices were really the killer.
in terms of the text, the biggest issue here is simply that it’s not clear to me that Ashcroft knows anything about either hockey in particular or professional sports in the United States generally. Danny’s narration, for example, claims that he has difficulty stopping while skating without just colliding with something, which is simply not how professional hockey works. like, this is one of the biggest professional sports on this continent; people don’t just luck their way into it. Eliot also makes the rather perplexing assumption that Danny wouldn’t have gone to college, which on one level could just be an Eliot thing but seemed rather like something Ashcroft felt he had to justify to readers, which betrays a significant misunderstanding of professional sports recruitment. given that Ashcroft was born in Ireland and grew up in the UK, where university sports aren’t really a thing, I assume he just genuinely didn’t know, but it does make me wonder why he decided to write this story in this way. later Danny tells Eliot that “you” (implicitly: professional hockey players) peak at age 25, which is very funny considering that there are only three players under the age of 25 on the Pittsburgh Penguin at the moment, and the average age of the team looks to be around 30 (Danny’s age). this is all easily searchable information, so it’s weird that Ashcroft doesn’t seem to have considered that when writing a Sports Romance it might make sense to actually read a little bit about the sport.
having said that, there are some things I think are good here. first and foremost is the writing of Eliot and Danny’s relationship. the characterization, to be sure, is pretty bare-bones, but I think Ashcroft actually does a really good job of conveying the emotional intensity of the beginning of a relationship when you’re just clicking with someone — I associate it with the emotions evoked by Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Hurrahing in Harvest” —
[...] which two, when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
Cocky captures the exhilaration of getting to know someone you, perhaps in spite of yourself, really like, someone you’re attracted to, someone who represents all of the things you never thought you could have — things you maybe never realized you were allowed to want in the first place. someone you’re having really good sex with (the sex scenes here are pretty good, I think). if its portrayal of its characters as such was nothing to write home about, I nonetheless think its portrayal of its characters’ emotional arcs was good.
beyond that, I was interested in the extent to which this is a novel without any real overarching conflict. the plot with Danny’s team manager takes place mainly off the page (and the resolution is entirely off the page). there is no interpersonal conflict between Danny and anyone else on his team — indeed, no interaction whatsoever between Danny and anyone else on the team, despite the fact that we’re told he’s very close to them/that they got him through a difficult time after his father died. on one level I think this again betrays Ashcroft’s ignorance of who sports teams work, but on another level I think it’s an interesting choice to have the narrative itself be almost entirely focused just on Eliot and Danny’s growing emotions for one another. this is truly, at the end of the day, just a romance novel, with only the thinnest hint of anything else. some of this is surely just my ignorance of the genre, but I feel like my expectation even from a rom-com plot is that at some point during the story there will be some kind of conflict between the love interests. here the extent of the conflict is about two chapters in the middle where, after they kiss, Eliot thinks he’s ruined the fake-dating arrangement by showing his real feelings for Danny and Danny thinks he’s ruined the fake-dating relationship and Eliot actually was just responding to The Heat Of The Moment. but it’s not the kind of Communication Barrier that creates meaningful conflict or even the kind of forced conflict of a rom-com. they immediately talk about it and realize they were being silly. it’s an interesting exercise, if nothing else.
so, as I said, it has ups and downs. parts I think are cute (and would likely be cuter without the Voices); parts I think are silly in an era where we have internet access and also there is a lot of meticulously researched sports media, including hockey-specific media (thinking about Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please!). I enjoyed it well enough. I do wish it hadn’t ended with Danny and Eliot preparing to adopt a child, but that’s a personal preference. I wasn’t sufficiently into Ashcroft’s writing to inspire me to read his other books, I don’t think, but if you’re into romance and not bothered by the sports inconsistencies (what a wild thing for me to be saying) this might be worth a look.
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