Game Changers Book Club: Tough Guy
Meet Ryan and Fabian.
Welcome to our first book club post, in which we discuss the installments of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series that were not included in the Crave adaptation. I’m excited to road-test this concept with you all — and I am absolutely winging it here, so as we progress please do let me know if there’s anything to add or subtract or approach differently. Certainly the books themselves will dictate that, as some are meatier than others.
On that note: I would love to keep the discussion as contained as possible to each book without looking forward. So, for example, even if everyone has totally read all of them already, I don’t think we should get into the weeds about what appears in The Long Game or Role Model until we actually arrive at those novels; I hope we can treat each book as if we’re really discovering them in the order in which Reid wrote them. That might not be possible, but there also might BE people who are reading along for the first time and I don’t want to spoil it for them. When we get to The Long Game, we can let it all out. Can’t wait.
Also, someone asked why we aren’t starting at the beginning with Game Changer and Heated Rivalry. I felt like maybe we’d discussed those pretty well when the show recaps came out, even just vis a vis the adaptation, but maybe we’ll tack them onto the end if there’s still an appetite to revisit them.
Tough Guy
This is the third tome in Reid’s series — the first two of course being, in order, Game Changer (adapted into Heated Rivalry’s third episode, and the end of its fifth), and Heated Rivalry. It also seems to rank pretty near the bottom of people’s favorites list. Granted, there are only six published at the moment, so it’s not that HARD to fall into the lower portion, but I get the sense that Game Changer, Tough Guy, and Common Goal are all finishing last, and it’s just a question of what order. I haven’t read Common Goal yet, so I’m looking forward to that next month and to figuring out what my actual ranking is; Game Changer isn’t BAD so much as it suffers from being, effectively, Rachel Reid’s warm-up book. There was good raw material there, but it’s overlong and overstuffed with sex scenes that don’t do anything for the plot. They stop being memorable and start being wallpaper. Reid herself has talked about learning the art of having the sex scenes be part of the story rather than what grinds it to a halt, and how she applied that lesson to Heated Rivalry. But, Kip and Scott are solid characters, and you can’t beat their big climax. (Their PLOT climax, that is; we’ve already covered that there are like 345 other climaxes.) It sets a solid foundation for what the series will become, and because it’s already made it to the screen, it’s difficult not to look fondly upon it when it gave us Wolf Parade and “I’m coming to the cottage.” As a novel, though, I don’t think it swims alongside HR, The Long Game, and Role Model. And neither does Tough Guy. Right now I’d put Tough Guy at the bottom.
The Plot, Quickly
Our main characters are Toronto Guardians defenseman Ryan Price and musician Fabian Saleh, the former being a character we first encounter in Heated Rivalry’s novel when Ilya sits next to him on a plane and notices his fear of flying. The scene serves a couple purposes related to Ilya: We’re reminded he is still working on his English (he gives Ryan his headphones and reads the subtitles on the movie they watch together), he is trying to keep his mind off Shane Hollander’s juicy prostate, and he’s a lot more perceptive and sensitive than he wants anyone to know. For Ryan, it probably exists because Reid wanted to scatter in some folks she could use in future books. If you have only watched the show, this moment gets distilled into episode 4, pre-tuna meltdown, when Shane and Ilya are watching Ryan play in a Buffalo game and briefly talk how often he’s traded, and how he once played with Ilya, which gives him the chance to say Ryan isn’t what people expect him to be (wink wink, neither are Ilya and Shane). Without knowledge of the books, it just passes for small talk between them — something they hadn’t done much of before — but now it feels like, much as with Reid, perhaps Jacob Tierney threw it in there in case he’d need it in the future. Can’t fault either for that.
Ryan Price is a six-foot-seven Yukon Cornelius of a dude. Or actually maybe more like this:
As such, while he’s technically a defenseman, Ryan mostly bounces around the league on one-year contracts and plays the role of enforcer. In essence, if someone really smashes one of your team’s guys, especially the stars, the enforcer will start a fight either with them or someone else on the team for a little light revenge. Or, if your team is losing 5-0 in the playoffs, the enforcer might start some shit just to DO it, to inject fight and feistiness that might carry the team to the next game and prevent another blowout. It’s very stupid and also kind of fun. Like, objectively, fighting is a dumb Neanderthal thing to do, and probably there are plenty of Neanderthals who would be like, “Excuse me, I just made this glorious cave painting, and you’re telling everyone all I do is smack Ogg on the head with my club? FOR SHAME.” But it’s part of the game, and in this case, it’s used to portray Ryan as a gentle giant who is merely playing the role of, ahem, a Tough Guy when he’s on the ice.
