Heated Rivalry, if you haven’t already heard of it, is about a pair of closeted hockey players who spend 10 years having an on-off relationship with each other. It was released as a TV series at the end of 2025 and really blew up online. It’s gotten really good reviews so I was keen on watching it, but it doesn’t seem to be streaming in Japan at the moment, sadly. So I decided to give the book a read instead!
I usually tend to hate-read romance novels - they’re great for turning your brain off, but I don’t always find the quality of them to be that high. Heated Rivalry is actually quite good though. I think this comes down to the stakes being a lot higher than your regular romance novel. One of the main characters is from Russia, a pretty anti-LGBT country, and the pair play in the NHL - which in the real world has never had a single person come out as LGBT. Which is a pretty insane statistic when you think about it. The author has mentioned that players have reached out to her privately after the release of the book, so it’s not like there are actually no LGBT players - it’s just the culture doesn’t really make anyone feel comfortable to come out about it.
In saying all that, Heated Rivalry is quite heated, so there’s plenty of R18+ scenes. Maybe I’m getting old but I skimmed over them a bit - but either way I wouldn’t really recommend you read this if you aren’t into that sort of stuff.