57 pages • 1-hour read
Pucking Wild
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Background
Series Context: Jacksonville Rays
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, antigay bias, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Like many contemporary romance novelists, Emily Rath has built on the world established in her first novel to create a series that further explores that novel’s characters and themes. The Jacksonville Rays series follows the lives of the players and staff members of Jacksonville’s new NHL hockey team. Building on the close-knit group of players from the first novel, Pucking Around, the series as a whole delves into the characters’ roles within the team as well as their relationships with the people who surround it.
Pucking Around follows the story of Rachel Price, a new medic for the Rays, as she falls in love with players Jake Compton and Ilmari Kinnunen, as well as the equipment manager, Caleb Sanford. The book shows the characters navigating their relationships with one another and the team as a whole while also coming to terms with the social complexities of their orientations and relationship structures (the polyamorous relationships that Rath explores in Pucking Around feature in many of her novels, including Pucking Sweet, the third novel in the series). The characters of Pucking Around all play important parts in the plot of Pucking Wild, where Rachel and her husbands help and support Tess while beginning their married life together.
The plots of the first three novels also bleed together, with certain events covered in multiple novels. The beginning of the relationship between Rays players Lukas Novikov and Colton Morrow and the team’s director of public relations, Poppy St. James, is covered in Pucking Around and continues in Pucking Sweet, where the characters must grapple with their complicated feelings for one another along with a surprise pregnancy. The Jacksonville Rays series also includes a prequel to the first novel (That One Night), as well as two sequel novellas (Pucking Ever After: Volume I and Volume II). As of 2025, two more novels in the series (Pucking Strong and Pucking Free) have also been announced.
Genre Context: Contemporary Sports Romance
Pucking Wild and the other Jacksonville Rays novels fall into the broad genre of contemporary romance, characterized by happy endings and familiar plotlines but also a focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. Pucking Wild is typical of the genre in this respect; although it deals with serious subjects, such as domestic abuse, complicated family dynamics, and divorce, it is underpinned by lighthearted and comedic moments. As in Pucking Wild, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed; these narratives often show protagonists helping each other overcome barriers not only to becoming romantically involved but also to being better, happier people.
Since they rely on familiar narrative structures, contemporary romances commonly feature tropes, archetypes, and recurring situations, such as friends-to-lovers relationships, accidental-roommates plotlines, and workplace settings. Pucking Wild falls within the popular romance subgenre of sports romances, in which one or more major characters play for a professional or high-ranking college sports team. Sports romances often contain a few scenes of games or competitions, but the featured sport isn’t typically a main focus. Instead, sports romances often use the team setting to focus on themes of community and camaraderie. Sports romances have become especially popular on BookTok—a subsection of TikTok dedicated to reviewing and analyzing books.
Though sports romance novels cover a wide range of sports, hockey romances have become especially popular, with novels like Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker (2022) and Elle Kennedy’s The Graham Effect (2023) earning high acclaim. However, the disproportionate representation of hockey in romance novels has given rise to criticism regarding the sport’s lack of cultural diversity and the way this translates to the romance genre. In 2023, for example, romance author Adriana Herrera wrote on the social media platform Threads, “I love hockey romance. […] But writing a piece on its popularity & not naming the demographics of that sport is interesting. An author can write a series with 20 hockey romances & never have to write a Black or brown hero, which is impossible in pretty much any other sport” (Herrera, Adriana [@ladriana_herrera]. “I love hockey romance.” Threads).
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