Hate You Always by Jennifer Sucevic

Narrated by Michael Gallagher and Jennifer Blom

Contemporary New Adult Hockey Romance. Stands alone but the series continues.

”I’m still ridiculously aware of Ryder’s presence. It’s always been like this with him. Even when we were children. There was just something about him that drew me and held my attention captive.”

I’m catching up on reviews and it’s been a while since I read Hate You Always by Jennifer Sucevic, so I am going to make this a quicker review than usual.

Juliette is in her last year of college where she was an excellent student – perhaps too excellent because she missed out on the whole college experience. One night she decides to finally go to a party and got a little too drunk. Luckily, her brother’s best friend and hockey teammate was there. They’ve crushed on each other for years but never acted on it because of her brother (who was barely in this, so I don’t really see the issue).

Ryder takes her home and helps her get in bed and finds her “bucket list” on her nightstand, with one of the items being having an orgasm with someone else. Well Ryder the man-whore is then determined to fulfill every need on the list.

I’m not going to write my likes and dislikes here because sadly, I only noted the things I didn’t like. He was such a man-whore it was almost gross. The misogyny was rampant in this and the sex scenes and some of the dialogue was cringy AF.

There were some good moments. It was a quick listen and I never really felt like DNFing (because a DNF is very rare for me). The first half was way better than the second, but since I had already gotten to 65% I wanted to finish to see the HEA. I just feel like I have read this book 100 times. There is absolutely nothing that stood out to me except some of the cheesy sex scenes.

Hate You Always has a lot of mixed reviews, with some loving it and some DNFs. I just feel “meh” about it.

The Narration: Both narrators were new to me. They were good but didn’t make the book better (sorry, I didn’t take notes on the narration)