Boone

BOONE is the eleventh instalment in Sawyer Bennett’s contemporary, adult PITTSBURGH TITANS contemporary, adult , hockey romance series focusing on the Pittsburgh Titans professional hockey team. This is twenty six year old Boone Rivers, and twenty-two year old, Lilly Hoffman’s story line. BOONE can be read as a stand alone without any difficulty. Any important information from the previous story lines is revealed where necessary.

NOTE: Due to the nature of the story line premise, there may be triggers for more sensitive readers. Have tissues at the ready, you are going to need them.

SOME BACKGROUND: Several months earlier, a devastating plane crashed claimed all but three members of the Pittsburgh Titans hockey team including owners, coaches and staff. Rebuilding the team, owner Brienne Norcross, offered positions to one-time professional and semi-pro players. These are their stories.

Told from dual first person perspectives (Boone and Lilly) BOONE follows the building romance and relationship between our story line couple. Boone Rivers volunteers at the local children’s hospital where he will meet, soon to be twelve year old, Aiden Hoffman, and his sister Lilly. Aiden has acute lymphoblastic leukemia and Lilly has become his mother, father, guardian and protector. With their father struggling at the bottom of a bottle, Lilly has little time for herself. Meeting hockey player Boone Rivers gives Lilly a chance at her own happiness but with the Pittsburgh Titans entering the playoffs, her brother’s illness worsening, and their father trying to get sober, Lilly battles between head and heart with the prospects that life is about to deal another blow. As her relationship with Boone becomes something more, the reality of what is heart breaking and sad. What ensues is the building romance and relationship between Boone and Lilly, and the fall-out as Aiden’s health takes a turn for the worse.

The world building focuses on dying and death, family and acceptance, grief, addiction and recovery. Boone is the personification of support and resilience, as Lilly must come to terms with what is happening and why.

The relationship between Boone and Lilly is one of immediate attraction. Aiden Hoffman is a big Pittsburgh Titans fan, and in this he is hoping for a romantic relationship between his sister and Boone. With her father in recovery, and her brother struggling with his health, Lilly’s guilt is exacerbated when she takes time for herself. The $ex scenes are intimate and passionate without the use of over the top, sexually graphic language and text.

There is a large ensemble cast of secondary and supporting characters including many of the previous story line couples and players we have already met. We are introduced to Aiden Hoffman, and his father Steven, as well as Boone’s parents, and his siblings Damien and Claire.

BOONE is a story of love and loss, grief and acceptance, family and friendships, relationships and love. The premise is heart breaking and emotional; the romance is seductive; the characters are strong, determined and charismatic.

This is the story of a young woman and her brother who are brought together with Boone a Titan hockey player who visits kids at the hospital. Aiden is hospitalized for his second bout of Leukemia when he meets Boone and they become fast friends. Lilly is sister carries the weight of the family on her shoulders, the family deli, her brother’s care and her alcoholic father leaving her with nothing for herself and her dreams on the back burner. When Boone meets her, he is struck by her strenght and sweetness. Sawyer was able to give us an emotionaly charged (ugly cry) love story, between a man and a woman, a brother and sister and even a lost father who is not strong enough to carry the weight of what life threw at him. This story is the love story of all love story and can’t compare with any others.