The Deal, The Mistake, and The Score, by Elle Kennedy

I recently read Elle Kennedy's The Deal, The Mistake, and The Score, a collection of fun, loosely-connected New Adult romances set in the college hockey world. In The Deal, aspiring singer Hannah Wells sets out to overcome a past trauma with some no-strings-attached sex with her new pal Garrett Graham, the captain of her school's championship-winning hockey team. In The Mistake, Garrett's teammate Logan meets the perfect girl... but manages to screw up their budding relationship almost immediately. In The Score, Hannah's friend Allie falls into a rebound fling with the campus playboy, but they soon discover that their meaningless sex isn't so meaningless after all.

There is so much to like about this series: great dialogue, easygoing humor, sympathetic characters. Best of all, Kennedy's protagonists seem mentally healthy enough to be in a successful relationship—or they get there by the end of the book, anyway. Trust me: this is by no means true of all, or even most, romance novel characters. She makes a couple of missteps (I don't care for the dismissive tone of the term "puck bunnies", and there's a scene in The Mistake where I felt the characters REALLY should have called the cops), but even with these minor flaws, Kennedy's books are more lively and charming than Courtney Milan's Trade Me, and about a million times healthier, smarter, and less infuriating than Jamie McGuire's Beautiful Disaster. There should be at least one more book in this series, and I'm looking forward to reading it.