Big Stick Energy by Sarina Bowen Book Review – A Fake-Dating Hockey Romance That Melts the Ice and the Heart
- Joao Nsita
- 7 minutes ago
- 11 min read
Why Big Stick Energy by Sarina Bowen Is the Hockey Romance You Will Not Be Able to Put Down This Summer
What happens when you accidentally send your most private, most NSFW fantasy to the exact person you wrote it about?
If you are Darcy Kendrick, admin to the New York Legends hockey team, the answer is: pure, spectacular, floor-yourself embarrassment — followed by one of the most entertaining fake-dating romances published in 2026.
Big Stick Energy, published June 30, 2026 by Forever (Grand Central Publishing), is the second book in Sarina Bowen's New York Legends series — though readers who missed book one, Thrown for a Loop, will have no problem diving straight in. Each book stands alone. And this one stands exceptionally tall.
Eric Tremaine is the team captain — steady, golden-retriever warm, quietly carrying the weight of a family grief that has made him smaller than he deserves to be. Darcy Kendrick is the overworked admin who keeps the entire operation running, who has a sharper tongue than most people expect, and who has been keeping her distance from Eric specifically because she has absolutely, definitely, completely inconvenient feelings for him. She meant to tell her best friend about those feelings in graphic detail. She sent the DM to Eric instead.
Beneath the comedy of that extraordinary opening, Big Stick Energy is a book about two people who have both made themselves smaller to protect others — Darcy from her chaotic family, Eric from the grief that surrounds his mother's inability to let go of the son she lost — learning to be seen at their actual size. That is what the best romance does. It does not just give you the kiss at the end. It gives you the people before the kiss, and makes you understand why they deserve it.
No one writes breathless tension, banter and swoon quite like Sarina Bowen. This book is proof.
The Story at the Heart of Big Stick Energy
Darcy Kendrick has her hands in approximately seventeen things at any given moment. As admin to the New York Legends hockey team during a playoff run, she is the person who makes everything work — logistics, travel, communication, the thousand daily details that keep a professional sports organisation from collapsing in on itself. She is good at her job. She is deeply competent. She is also carrying a complicated relationship with her chaotic family that has made her prickly, private, and determined to keep things professional. Especially with Eric Tremaine, the team captain she has been quietly, furiously, utterly unsuccessfully avoiding developing feelings for.
The inciting incident is, objectively, a romance novel's gift: the accidental DM. Darcy drafts a message to her best friend that describes, in extensive and NSFW detail, exactly what she thinks about Eric Tremaine. She sends it to Eric. He reads it. And then — because Eric Tremaine is a golden retriever in human form — instead of making it weird, he proposes a plan. They are both attending the same run of summer weddings. Her family is complicated. His history is painful. They fake-date their way through the wedding season and call it even.
What follows is the fake-dating romance at its most satisfying. The weddings become a pressure cooker — each one dropping Darcy and Eric into closer proximity, more shared vulnerability, more moments where the line between performance and reality stops being visible. Eric, Bowen makes clear, is not performing very hard.
He is the kind of man who genuinely wants to see the person in front of him, and Darcy — for all her defensive prickliness — is exactly the kind of woman who stops him from settling for being seen as something smaller.
The emotional stakes deepen through Eric's family situation. His mother cannot let go of his brother, lost twelve years ago, and Eric has spent those twelve years making himself quiet so as not to disturb her grief. He has shrunk into the shape of someone who takes up less space than he deserves. Darcy, who has spent her own life managing a family that requires constant management, is the first person who notices. The book builds to its emotional resolution with exactly the warmth and patience the setup deserves.
How Sarina Bowen Brings This Story to Life
Sarina Bowen is a 24-time USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and Big Stick Energy demonstrates exactly why her name carries so much weight in the sports romance genre. Her prose is clean, propulsive, and warm — the kind of writing that pulls you through pages without your noticing the time passing.
The dual POV — alternating between Darcy and Eric — gives the fake-dating trope its maximum effectiveness. When the reader can see Eric's perspective on what he is feeling, the tension of watching Darcy fail to recognise it becomes the novel's central pleasure. Bowen's Eric-voice is particularly strong: steady, quietly funny, and capable of unexpected emotional depth that makes him one of the more memorable heroes in recent hockey romance.
The banter is the genre's best current example of how sharp dialogue serves romantic tension. Every exchange between Darcy and Eric crackles with the specific energy of two people who are trying very hard not to say what they actually mean, and largely failing.
The Themes That Make Big Stick Energy So Much More Than a Sports Romance
Making yourself smaller for the people you love. Both Darcy and Eric have spent years contracting themselves to fit the shape of what the people around them need. Eric quiets his own grief and joy to avoid disturbing his mother's. Darcy manages everyone else's chaos rather than acknowledging her own needs. Big Stick Energy is a book about what happens when someone finally sees you at your actual size — and the specific liberation of being known.
Family as the thing we carry. The family dynamics in Big Stick Energy are more complex and more emotionally substantive than most sports romances allow themselves. Eric's grief over his brother, and his mother's inability to move through her own, give the novel a real emotional weight that the fake-dating comedy needs to feel genuinely meaningful rather than merely entertaining.
Competence as a form of armour. Darcy's professional excellence — the way she manages, organises, and controls — is both her greatest strength and a wall she uses to keep people from getting close enough to disappoint her. Bowen is smart about this: the competence is real and the armour is also real, and the novel doesn't ask Darcy to choose between them so much as to let one person in past the wall.
What a good man actually looks like. Eric Tremaine is one of the best-written romance heroes in the sports romance genre because his goodness is specific rather than generic. He is not kind in the abstract. He is kind in particular, detailed, Eric-shaped ways that make his care for Darcy feel real rather than aspirational.
If you love sports romance with real emotional depth, explore our Romance Books collection at That Love Podcast for more recommendations. You might also love the stories we tell in our original audio drama series, which frequently explore the same themes of love found in unlikely circumstances.
Big Stick Energy leaves you with the specific warmth of a book that knows what it is doing and does it beautifully.
What Big Stick Energy Gets Absolutely Right
The accidental DM premise. This is one of the more memorably funny opening gambits in recent romance, and Bowen executes it with perfect comedic timing while immediately using the embarrassment to reveal exactly who both characters are.
Eric Tremaine. He is the golden retriever of romance heroes — genuinely kind, patient without being a pushover, and capable of the exact kind of steady warmth that makes you root for a character before he has done anything particularly heroic. The way he handles the accidental DM tells you everything about who he is.
The family subplot. The Eric-mother-dead-brother emotional thread gives the book genuine stakes beyond the fake-dating mechanics and makes the eventual emotional resolution land with real feeling.
The pacing. Bowen builds the tension across the wedding-season structure with the patience and confidence of an author who trusts the slow build — and the payoff earns every page of waiting.
The banter. Clean, sharp, funny, and always revealing something true about the characters beneath it.
A Few Places Where Big Stick Energy Could Have Gone Further
Darcy's family. The chaotic family who provide the context for Darcy's defensiveness are entertainingly drawn but occasionally feel more like a source of comedy than a source of genuine emotional complication. A slightly deeper engagement with the specific cost of Darcy's family management would have enriched her arc.
The supporting cast. The Legends team members who populate the edges of the story are fun but briefly sketched — readers who loved the ensemble energy of Bowen's earlier series may find the supporting cast here a little thinner.
The resolution pacing. The book's final third moves quickly toward its resolution, and the emotional unpacking of Eric's family situation — which has been so carefully built — is resolved in a way that is satisfying but slightly faster than the setup suggests it needed to be.
If You Loved Big Stick Energy, Read These Next
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid is the gold standard of rival-to-lovers hockey romance — two men on opposing teams, a secret relationship, and a slow-burn intensity that rewards patient reading. Reid's understanding of hockey culture is as specific and as authentic as Bowen's, and readers who love Big Stick Energy's hockey world-building will find everything they need in Heated Rivalry. Buy it on Amazon.
The Icebreaker by Hannah Grace offers another entry in the fake-dating hockey romance tradition with a warmer, campus-romance energy — perfect for readers who loved the slow reveal of real feeling beneath the fake relationship in Big Stick Energy. Grace's writing has the same propulsive, cosy quality as Bowen's best work. Buy it on Amazon.
For more hockey romance recommendations and relationship stories told through a fresh lens, explore our Romance Books section at That Love Podcast.
Who Will Love Big Stick Energy the Most
Fans of fake-dating romance. The wedding-season fake-dating structure is executed with real craft, and the specific escalation of each event is the trope at its most satisfying.
Sports romance readers. Bowen's hockey world is specific and warm, and her knowledge of the sport (she started cheering for Yale hockey in college) gives the team dynamics a credibility that casual research cannot produce.
Readers who love golden-retriever heroes. Eric Tremaine is the kind, steady, quietly magnificent kind of romance hero that a significant proportion of the genre's readership will find immediately irresistible.
Anyone wanting a summer read with real emotional depth. Big Stick Energy is fun and fast, but it has genuine feeling underneath the comedy.
Fans of warm contemporary romance might also love browsing our relationship advice content at That Love Podcast.
Content Warnings: grief and parental loss (referenced, not graphic), family dysfunction, adult content.
How Big Stick Energy Stayed With Me Long After I Finished It
What stayed with me was Eric seeing Darcy. Not the hockey, not the fake-dating mechanics, not even the genuinely great banter — it was the specific moment when Eric recognises that Darcy has been managing everyone else's chaos for so long that nobody has ever asked what she needs.
I think about that a lot in the context of how I build stories. The most powerful romantic moment is not always the grand gesture. Sometimes it is just someone pausing long enough to actually look. Eric Tremaine looks. He looks with the patient, warm, completely unashamed attention of someone who has decided this person is worth his full presence. And Darcy — who has never been on the receiving end of that — doesn't quite know what to do with it.
Neither would I. That is why this book works.
Final Verdict: Is Big Stick Energy by Sarina Bowen Worth Reading?
Big Stick Energy is Sarina Bowen doing what she does better than almost anyone else in contemporary hockey romance — building a love story that is funny on the surface and genuinely moving underneath, with characters whose specific emotional baggage makes their eventual happiness feel earned rather than convenient.
The accidental DM premise is one of the genre's most entertaining setups in recent memory. Eric Tremaine is the kind of romance hero the genre always promises and rarely fully delivers. Darcy is a heroine whose competence and prickliness feel real rather than affectedly quirky. The wedding-season structure gives the fake-dating trope a natural escalation framework that Bowen uses with complete confidence.
This is a book that will make you laugh, warm your heart, and remind you why the sports romance genre, at its best, is one of the most reliably pleasurable things available on a summer afternoon.
Bold, flirty, and hot enough to melt the ice. Pure fun with serious chemistry.
About Sarina Bowen
Sarina Bowen is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of contemporary romance, with more than 24 appearances on bestseller lists across her career. A Yale University graduate who took up figure skating as an adult hobby and cheered for the Yale hockey team in college, her love of the sport infuses her hockey romance series — including Brooklyn Bruisers, True North, and now New York Legends — with an authenticity that sets her work apart. Her co-authored novels with Elle Kennedy (the Him series) are fan favourites across the genre. She lives in New Hampshire with her family and enough hockey gear to stock a rink.
Learn more about Sarina Bowen: Official Website | Goodreads Profile | Instagram
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Frequently Asked Questions About Big Stick Energy by Sarina Bowen
1. Is Big Stick Energy part of a series? Yes — Big Stick Energy is the second book in Sarina Bowen's New York Legends series, following Thrown for a Loop. However, each book follows a different couple and functions as a complete standalone. Readers who have not read Thrown for a Loop will have no difficulty jumping into Big Stick Energy, though reading book one adds context for some supporting characters.
2. What are the main romance tropes in Big Stick Energy? Big Stick Energy features fake dating, only one room (in various configurations across the wedding-season events), workplace romance (Darcy works for the team Eric captains), and a grumpy/sunshine adjacent dynamic where Eric's golden-retriever warmth contrasts with Darcy's prickly defensiveness.
3. How steamy is Big Stick Energy? Big Stick Energy is a moderately steamy contemporary romance — the tension builds slowly and purposefully, and the intimate scenes, when they arrive, are well-written and satisfying. It is not explicit to the level of erotica, but it delivers on the heat its premise promises.
4. Is Big Stick Energy suitable for younger readers? Big Stick Energy is written for adult readers. The adult content, some mature themes around grief and family dynamics, and the sexual tension throughout make it most appropriate for readers 18 and over.
5. Is there an audiobook version of Big Stick Energy? Yes — Big Stick Energy is available in audiobook format (Unabridged) from Forever/Grand Central Publishing, released alongside the print and ebook editions on June 30, 2026. Sarina Bowen's books are consistently praised in their audio format, and this dual-POV romance translates particularly well to audio performance.
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External Resources
For more book reviews, discussions, and recommendations, check out these fantastic resources: Dear Author – Honest and well-thought-out reviews with sharp commentary. All About Romance – One of the oldest romance review sites with extensive coverage. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books – Humorous and insightful reviews with a podcast and community. Goodreads – The world's largest book community for reviews and recommendations. Book Riot – A lively hub for book news, lists, and recommendations across all genres. We hope these resources help you find your next favourite read!
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