If you're familiar with my reviews and reading tastes, you'll know that I haven't always been the easiest reader to win over with romance, particularly sports romance. Give me a political struggle inside an elaborate fantasy world and I'll settle in quite happily. Give me a handsome athlete with a parade of willing women and the confidence of a man who's never had to repeat himself, and I tend to become a tad suspicious.
And Garrett Graham didn't immediately do anything to improve his chances with me.
He's the celebrated captain of Briar University’s hockey team, used to being admired and quite unable to accept that Hannah Wells doesn't want to be his. She's earned one of the few high marks in their ethics class, whereby Garrett has failed the midterm and needs to pass the repeat examination to remain eligible to play in the hockey team. Hannah turns down his request multiple times, and Garrett responds by continually asking until he discovers something she wants badly enough to make an arrangement worthwhile.
Because Hannah has developed a crush on football player Justin Kohl, and she has no idea how to grab his attention, Garrett proposes a deal: she will tutors him and he'll pretend to date her, allowing his campus popularity to make Justin notice what he's been overlooking.
It isn't a revolutionary premise to be sure. Fake dating, tutoring sessions and the collision between an academically accomplished woman and an overly confident athlete have become familiar territory in contemporary romance. But Elle Kennedy’s success lies in how thoroughly she understands the pleasure of watching two people insist they're pursuing everybody except each other.
The strongest element of The Deal is the chemistry between Hannah and Garrett. Elle Kennedy allows them to spend time together before requiring that the relationship needs to become romantic. They study, argue, tease each other, share meals and gradually rethink their early assumptions.
Their banter has an easy rhythm that makes their attraction believable, and Hannah is intelligent, sarcastic and unimpressed by Garrett’s status. She doesn't dissolve into breathless admiration whenever he enters the room, nor does she allow his sporting ability to compensate for his irritating behaviour. And Garrett enjoys the resistance because he's surrounded by people who already know who they think he is, while Hannah talks to the person sitting in front of her.
The alternating first-person narration supports that progression beautifully. From Hannah’s perspective, Garrett starts off as an arrogant campus celebrity who's always gotten whatever he wants. His chapters reveal someone more disciplined and vulnerable than that: a capable student, a loyal captain and a young man carrying a private history that has very little resemblance to his privileged public image.
This doesn't excuse his initial refusal to accept Hannah’s answer, and his persistence is presented as mischievous charm when it would be exhausting in real life. So it's one of many moments where a novel concerned with consent is too willing to romanticise a man who treats a woman’s refusal as the beginning of a negotiation. But, once the relationship becomes intimate, Garrett’s conduct is remarkably more attentive than his early behaviour eludes to.
Garrett’s father, Phil Graham, is a hockey legend whose public reputation hides years of physical and emotional abuse. Garrett grew up watching Phil assault his mother and later became another of his father's targets.
This history complicates Garrett’s relationship with hockey, because he sincerely loves the game, but it stays enmeshed with his father’s expectations and control. Phil sees Garrett’s talent as an extension of his own legacy, but Garrett wants a professional career for himself, while also taking a particular satisfaction in proving that he can become better than the man who raised him.
Grrett's deepest fear isn't failure on the ice, though. It's actually the possibility that his father’s violence has been passed onto him.
This creates a useful parallel between the two protagonists. Hannah struggles with the shame and self-blame imposed upon survivors of sexual violence, while Garrett worries that abuse has scarred his character so permanently that he might eventually replicate it. Both of them are carrying responsibility for another person’s cruelty.
The novel is especially direct about the protection granted by reputation. Hannah’s attacker benefits from social connections and a community wanting to doubt her story, and Phil benefits from fame, wealth and the admiration of hockey supporters who know nothing about his private behaviour. In both cases, the survivor has to live with the consequences that never touch the person who instigated the harm.
Kennedy depicts these failures clearly, but she doesn't really examine them for long. The legal system, community hostility and sporting culture appear mainly via their effects on Hannah and Garrett, so this ultimately remains a character-driven romance insead of an extensive investigation into institutional power.
I have a 'thing' about novels being wrapped up in a too-perfect bow at the ending, and the final conflict relies on blackmail, financial dependence and a breakup that could have been avoided through one honest conversation. Hannah thinks she's protecting Garrett’s future by ending the relationship, and her motive is understandable, but the decision feels imposed by the requirements of romance structure instead of arising naturally from the relationship Kennedy has developed.
The solution is even more convenient because a newly accessible trust fund removes Garrett’s financial dependence and substantially weakens his father’s hold over him. It gives Garrett the freedom to cut Phil out of his life, but it also resolves a complicated abusive relationship through opportune timing and accessible money.
The emotional confrontation has merit as Garrett stops continuing the silence that allowed his father’s public mythology to survive. But the practical obstacles are erased so fast that the resolution can't live up to the strength of the earlier character work.
This book didn't surprise me because of its tropes. It surprised me because I genuinely grew to care about the two people living inside them.
Kennedy really knows how to create romantic momentum. Hannah and Garrett are funny together, sexually compatible and convincing as friends before they become a couple.
Their relationship works because each of them eventually sees the person hidden behind the other’s public identity: Hannah isn't fragile or defined by what was done to her, and Garrett isn't the foolish athlete or the invulnerable campus king.
The way the novel handes sexual recovery is done with genuine sensitivity, especially in its emphasis on communication, trust and Hannah’s agency. Its treatment of women beyond the central relationship, however, is far less thoughtful and the early pressure disguised as flirtation, casual slut-shaming, possessiveness and the convenient final resolution ultimately stopped an otherwise absorbing romance from receiving a higher rating.
Even with those reservations, I absolutely understand why this book retains such a vast readership. It's funny without becoming frivolous, explicit without doing away with emotional intimacy and familiar without feeling entirely mechanical.
Sometimes execution matters just as much as invention, and The Deal takes a very well-used romantic arrangement and packs it with enough warmth, humour and vulnerability to make the outcome fulfilling even when there's never any doubt about where Hannah and Garrett are heading.
Content warnings: Sexual assault and rape discussed throughout; trauma responses; explicit sexual content; childhood physical abuse; domestic violence; emotional abuse; coercive control; victim-blaming; blackmail; fighting; alcohol use; death of a parent; misogynistic language; slut-shaming; strong profanity.
🏒 Read this if you enjoy college romance and sporting settings
💞 A fake relationship that begins with a mutually beneficial deal
📚 Tutoring sessions filled with sharp banter and growing attraction
🫶 Friendship, trust and unexpected emotional intimacy
🎶 A young woman reclaiming her confidence and personal agency
⚠️ Contains explicit sex, sexual assault, domestic abuse, violence and strong language.
Book Details
The Deal by Elle Kennedy
Paperback ISBN
978-0349440842 — Piatkus paperback edition published in Australia on 14 November 2023.
Hardcover ISBN
978-0349447155 — Piatkus limited collector’s hardcover edition published in Australia on 11 November 2025 with printed edges, illustrated endpapers and colour character artwork.
eBook ISBN
978-0349440835 — Piatkus digital eBook edition published in Australia on 14 November 2023.
Audiobook ISBN
978-1511372824 — Audible Studios unabridged audiobook edition narrated by Christian Fox and Lorelei Avalon and released on 3 November 2015.
Genre
Contemporary Romance; New Adult Fiction; Sports Romance; College Romance; Erotic Romance; Relationship Fiction
Subgenre
Hockey Romance; Campus Romance; Fake-Dating Romance; Friends-to-Lovers Romance; Trauma-Recovery Romance; Dual-POV Romance; Coming-of-Age Romance; Explicit Romance
Tropes / Literary Threads
Fake dating; tutoring arrangement; popular athlete and academically gifted heroine; opposites attract; friends becoming lovers; he falls first; forced proximity; growing trust; found family; mutual vulnerability; healing after trauma; abusive parent; sporting ambition.
Publisher
Piatkus — an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group and Hachette UK — publishes the edition currently sold in Australia.
Series
Off-Campus, Book One — followed by The Mistake, The Score, The Goal and The Legacy.
Formats Available
Paperback; Television Tie-In Paperback; Collector’s Hardcover; eBook; Kindle; EPUB; Unabridged Digital Audiobook.
Audiobook Narrators
Christian Fox and Lorelei Avalon
Audiobook Length
Approximately 12 hours and 25 minutes for the unabridged English-language recording.
Original Release Date
24 February 2015 — first independently published by Elle Kennedy.
Australian Release Date
14 November 2023 — current Piatkus paperback edition released in Australia.
Page Count
400 pages — Piatkus paperback edition with ISBN 978-0349440842.
Where to BuyThe Deal by Elle Kennedy
📚 Amazon
Affiliate Disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you purchase through my Amazon affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I also encourage supporting Australian booksellers such as QBD Books, independent booksellers, and self-published authors whenever possible.
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose
work explores literature through the
lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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