Oh wow! Very different from Holiday’s Princess for Christmas series, but I absolutely loved it! Mike and Aurora are 2 people who had faced loss and disappointment. They needed to work on their issues and struggles both separately and together. I loved that Mike’s career as a professional hockey player was somewhat in the background, which means you will love him and his story even if hockey isn’t really your thing. He also had a daughter, family, friends, and other interests that rounded out his character and life. I loved that Aurora, a dance instructor, had a fulfilling life that she loved, after a horrible experience, and also had friends who loved and supported her. Their interactions started with forced proximity thanks to Mike’s daughter. Plenty of scenes included the 3 of them and pushed the plot forward in unexpected ways. Mike and Aurora’s romance blossomed with a slow burn from friends to friends-with-benefits to even more. Holiday included attention and advocacy for mental health care that was normalized and appropriate for the story. Honestly, a wonderful surprise of a romance. All the stars!
Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC to read and review. All opinions are my own.

Canadian Boyfriend was a cute hockey romance and I appreciated how it approached mental health, grief, and therapy. However, the immature and illogical setup hindered my enjoyment. Though I liked Rory and Mike as individual characters, I wasn't really convinced by their relationship.

I was skeptical about the idea of a fake Canadian boyfriend going into the book, but I thought it had potential. I thought it was cute how the letters to a fictional version of Mike served as a diary and an outlet for Rory during difficult years of her life. However, I found the way it was handled in the modern timeline unrealistic and immature. Rory should have at least mentioned that she recognized Mike from her job at the mall, especially when he mentioned that he hated liars. The letters serving as the cause of the third act conflict was ridiculous and predictable. Mike blew it way out of proportion, especially for how quickly the conflict was resolved.

There are a few “quirks” in the writing that were probably meant to be endearing or unique but they were overused and grew irritating. Rory refers to Mike by his full name “Mike Martin” every single time she references him. It has no in-text explanation and it got old quickly. She also refers to his smile as a “chapstick smile” that happens in three parts. Every time he smiles it's written as “click-click-click.” I get what it was trying to do but it honestly brought to mind a demon-possessed smile more than anything cute or charming.

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Jenny Holiday always does such a wonderful job crafting heartwarming romances, and she has done it once again. I will admit, I was drawn to the premise of this book. I love the idea of fate, and how can I argue when the universe brought "Mall Mike" back into Aurora's life. It seemed like such a serendipitous reunion, too. Both Mike and Aurora found themselves weighed down with emotional baggage, and now they had each other to help unpack it.

Here I am, talking about baggage, making this book sound so heavy, but it wasn't. That's also a skill of Holiday's. She wove those weightier elements into the story in a way that did not disturb the overall lighter feel, and that's something I really appreciated. There's quite a bit of focus on mental health which I thought was handled well, but there was also so much fun, hope, and joy in the tale.

Mike was a doll who was still navigating his grief following his wife's death. The way he worked so hard on his relationship with his pre-teen daughter was so sweet, but there were all these other small, quiet things he did that showed off his heart of gold. And though it had been almost a decade since Aurora abandoned her ballerina dreams, she was still dealing with the scars it left behind. It was beautiful to see these two slightly-wounded people find some comfort and healing with each other.

As I have previously indicated, both Aurora and Mike had some work to do on themselves, so don't expect a whirlwind romance. This was more on the slow-burn though the attraction, sparks, desire, and everything else was obvious. But, not to worry friends. All that waiting was rewarded with a most precious epilogue. It was something that was so perfect for these two.

Overall: I adored seeing Aurora's Canadian boyfriends turn from fiction to reality and can confirm that real Canadian boyfriends >>> imaginary Canadian boyfriends.

When Aurora Evans was a teenager she met a hockey player from Canada in the Mall of America. Ever since that day she would tell everyone that he was her boyfriend and that they were dating.

Fast forward to the present time, Aurora is teaching a dance class, and in walks that hockey player. Mike Martin walked in with his daughter. Mike is a single dad widower who still has a great deal of grief over the passing of his wife.

Aurora is way too nervous to tell him about what she has done in the past. So she decides to keep it a secret from him. I loved the pacing of this story. The story took place over a year and I feel like it helped both main characters grow. I also really enjoyed Mike’s daughter Olivia. I feel like she was a great supporting character.

Thank you to NetGalley and Forever Publishing for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒂𝒍𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒚 𝒈𝒐𝒕 𝒎𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈. 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒈𝒐𝒕 𝒎𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈.

What I liked:
The different relationships between Aurora, Mike, and Olivia
I think this book did a good job of addressing mental health (grief, panic attacks, eating disorder, toxic relationships) through therapy.
I liked the friendship that the main characters built before becoming involved romantically

What I didn’t like:
How Aurora constantly referred to the MMC by his full name (Mike Martin)
Mike’s reaction to Aurora’s letters and finding out he was her fake teenage boyfriend (no idea why it was such a big deal)
The ending was abrupt

Love the concept of Canadian Boyfriend.
Rory (Aurora) Evans is a dance teacher, whose dreams of being a professional ballet dancer didn't pan out. Enter Mike Martin, a NHL hockey player born and raised in the Great White North. He's recently widowed and raising daughter Olivia, who is a student at Rory's studio.
I'm divided on this one. I was solidly invested for the first half, then found the alternating chapters between Rory and Mike to be a touch repetitive. And I did not love how the "meet cute" from the beginning played out by the end.
However, this is my first Jenny Holiday book and I greatly enjoyed her writing style and humour, as well as the handling of heavier topics in the story.
Overall, recommended!

Unfortunately I didn't like the story at all and I couldn't get into it at all. It fell flat, something was missing for me regarding their connection and something happening. I just didn't feel a connection to the characters or to them together. I had to DNF at 25%.

I loved this sweet romance between a former ballet dancer and a widowed hockey player. I thought their chemistry was off the charts, I love that they talk through their emotions and the growth shown during the story as they both work on themselves with therapy, I love how much work they put into making their relationships healthy without it feeling too preachy about their respective issues. Perfect for fans who want a true romance vs a straight up rom-com.

This book was sooo good. The characters are likable and have so much depth. Meeting again as adults, and as Mike Martin is navigating the grief of his wife’s death and his tween daughter’s angst, there is so much vulnerability and tenderness. Both Mike and Aurora have their issues, but are working through them together and through therapy. They truly made each other feel seen and were better together. Swoon. This romance is both sweet and complex with rich backstories for both main characters. Highly recommend.

Read CANADIAN BOYFRIEND for
🥰 Friends-to-lovers romance
🩰 Ballet teacher finding her voice and reclaiming dance joy
🏒 Professional (NHL) hockey player humble stardom
❤️‍🩹 Mental health rep and healing journeys
🔥 Slow-burn romance with one open-door scene
💕 Dual POV

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5 stars)

THIS HIT THE SPOT!

I absolutely devoured this book! I don't know exactly what made it so perfect, but I was here for the romance, the hockey (my first hockey romance book) and the characters.

Truly loved it, when you want to just leave a book feeling HAPPY, pick this one up!

This book was a fun read!

I really liked the development of Mike and Rory's relationship. It starts out with Mike grieving the loss of his late wife who died in a tragic accident. He is trying to make his daughters life as full of joy as he can and one of the ways in which he does this is by continuing her dance lessons with Rory, a ballet school dropout.
Rory has been a bit of an outcast all her life. When she was a kid, she worked at a coffee shop in her local mall. This is where she met Mike Martin for the first time. He was just passing through for hockey but she had an instant crush on him. This crush turned into a fictional boyfriend who make her hard days a little brighter. It also made her feel less alone despite her only having only one encounter with Mike Martin. That is until he walks into the dance studio she works at years later...

What I liked:
How loving Mike is towards is daughter. Their character development was great.
The discussion of how toxic ballet culture is especially when it comes to food.
How Rory and Mike find safety in one another and can rely on each other in a way neither of them thought possible.
The way Mike is vulnerable with his feelings and is so honest.
The mention of therapy and how important and useful it can be.
How supportive Mike is of Rory. He truly loves and appreciates her.
Rory's letters to Mike from her childhood.

What I didn't like:
The way Rory called Mike "Mike Martin" every time she mentioned him in her head. It was so annoying and weird.
How Mike reacted to Rory's secret. He acted like she stole his identity and then plotted his demise. It was very overdramatic and rushed. What Rory did was hardly a big enough deal to react they way he did.

Overall I would rate this book a 3.5/5

We came into Canadian Boyfriend (our first Jenny Holiday read), thinking it would be a cute romcom, but it was a little bit more. It tackles some tough subjects with care and opened our hearts to new characters.

Aurora and Mike’s road to love was a slow burn. They came into each other’s lives a little bit broken and looking for someone to lean on (even if they already had some pretty great friends to support them). We liked that the romance wasn’t rushed and they had a chance to build a friendship to start. The drama surrounding her secret Canadian boyfriend was fun to unravel but it also made us nervous as we knew it would cause a problem down the line! Olivia was a great addition as she was the reason they were brought together in the first place! Our heart broke for her but her bond with Miss Rory was special and lovely. Overall a great read for someone who is looking for a love story with real life heartache.

side note: the Canadian stereotypes felt a little heavy handed (ie: Chesterfield, hozer) and while it can be funny, the repetitiveness of it got old. Maybe that’s because of where we’re from/where we live.

Read if you like:
▪️Single dad romance
▪️Sports romance
▪️Forced proximity
▪️Friends to lovers
▪️Mental health rep (grief, anxiety, panic attacks, disordered eating)

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an ARC of Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday.
Rory creates a fake Canadian boyfriend all throughout high school, she writes him letters, tells him everything that she cannot tell anyone else. So imagine her surprise when her dance student's single dad actually turns out to be her Canadian boyfriend.
I wish she had told him sooner, I hate the secret keeping trope. I find it to be an easy breaking point in the relationship that could have been avoided.
The amount of emotional healing in this novel from all the characters in the story was inspiring. They were both going through big changes in their lives, and used that time to help heal each other.
I found the story to be moving at a much slower pace than these stories typically go. Which is understandable because they were going through such big life changes, but I did wish that it had been paced just a bit quicker.
Overall, I thought that there was good chemistry between them, but I wish it was a little quicker.

This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year and I'm so thankful to Forever Pub for sending me a physical copy as well as the ebook. I related SO heavily to Aurora, especially with her struggles finding her confidence again. Mike's struggles and depictions of grief were so realistic and you can tell Jenny Holiday took the time and care to craft the narrative that way. 5/5 stars.

The concept of this book sounded a little silly to me, but I thought it worked really well. As with a lot of contemporary romances, there are bits you have to suspend disbelief for, but there are also a lot of very real and heavy topics (grief, disordered eating, growing up with an almond mom, etc). I was actually surprised by how deeply some of these topics were explored and how well they were handled. The growth of both of our main characters was so great to read and I loved the growth of their friendship.

I thought the pacing of this book was good, and I really liked that even though it was dual POV we didn't just get rehashing of the same scenes in each POV. The author did a great job of each character's inner monologue and I really loved both of our MCs. The only thing that bothered me was how Aurora only calls the MMC "Mike Martin". Every time she mentions him (which is often) it's using his full name, and that was a little irksome to me.

I combined audio/eyeball reading for this book, and it worked out really well. This book's narration was *chef's kiss* perfection. Both narrators were amazing, and really brought the characters to life. I also loved the choice of having each narrator say all their dialogue/text lines, even when it wasn't their POV. I wish more books did this!!! I will definitely listen to anything Joshua Jackson or Emily Ellet narrates.

Thanks to Hachette Audio and Forever for this ALC/ARC!

This book was really cute, but I do want to caution readers, this is less of a romance story and more of a self-discovery story. Both characters had a lot to overcome and deal with, and I really loved reading about their journey. The ONLY criticism I have is....why on earth was the made-up boyfriend thing actually an issue? It made me dislike the MMC that he had such a hard time with it.

I actually listened to the audiobook of this one, but the publisher sent me an e-ARC as well.

Aurora first meets Mike Martin at a coffee shop in the Mall of the Americas as a teenager. He was a Canadian hockey player; she was a ballerina, stressed and friendless. So she turns this guy she met once into her fake Canadian boyfriend. She writes him letters (which are basically just a diary of her thoughts) until the day she decides to quit ballet--then she decides she doesn't need the fake boyfriend anymore.

Fast forward 13 years, and she comes face to face with an older version of the same young man--only this time he's a widower and the father of one of her dance students. They strike up a friendship, and as they get closer, she knows she should confess that they actually met once before and come clean about how she turned the idea of him into her fake boyfriend--but enough time passes that it gets awkward, so she just keeps it to herself.

She ultimately ends up being a sort of live in nanny for his daughter, and her friendship with Mike turns into something more--but can it survive when he finds out the truth?

While the plot may seem a little cheesy--who *actually* creates an entirely fake boyfriend based on one random encounter?--I actually loved the story, start to finish. Therapy is normalized from the beginning. Mike and his daughter are both in therapy, dealing with the loss of their wife and mother respectively. And Mike encourages Aurora to start therapy herself when he realizes that she sometimes has panic attacks. She also has a distorted relationship with food thanks to her mother and her years spent as a ballerina, starving herself to achieve that perfect ballerina body. I was so proud of her (yes--it felt a little strange to feel THIS proud of a fictional character) but because of my own journey with disordered eating, seeing her work through it and also set firm boundaries with her mother was amazing.

I was also relieved that the third act break up didn't last *too* long. They eventually realized that maybe they both made mistakes and needed to talk to each other like grown-ups.

I don't typically do star ratings, but if I did, I'd give this one 4 very bright, shiny stars.

Unfortunately this book was a miss for me.

And I REALLY wanted to love this one.

I’m Canadian, we are a hockey family and I’m a dance mom. By all rights it should have been total match.

Alas, this book fell flat and felt to drag endlessly towards an anticlimactic drawn out affair of characters I was hoping to love but felt disconnected to.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for access to this digital ARC.

Canadian Boyfriend is a story about two people who are struggling to heal from past traumas. For Mike, after the death of his wife, he is now a single parent of an eleven year old daughter. He is navigating his hockey career, his daughter, and his own mental health. For Aurora, she is healing for her mother's control and emotional abuse as well as disordered thoughts about eating and panic attacks.

Aurora is now a dance teacher, after she quits her ballet career, and she meets Mike when he brings his daughter to Aurora's dance classes. Aurora soon realizes that she had actually met Mike fourteen years ago, and she used him or the idea of him as her fake Canadian boyfriend. She eventually moves in to Mike's basement to act as a nanny for his daughter, Olivia, when he is traveling for hockey.

As they spend more time together, they start to form a friendship, which eventually leads to them hooking up, but not in a relationship. I think that they cared about each other, but I wasn't necessarily rooting for them to be a couple and wind up together.

I think that the book cover is misleading because the book does cover heavy topics, and it doesn't really have much to do with hockey. I think that the romance in the story was secondary to the rest of the story.

For me, the story is about two people who are struggling, and they find each other. I think the story was well written, and I read it in a day.

Thanks to Netgalley and Forever Publishing for an ARC of this book.

Things I liked:
-Single Dad taking full responsibility of his step-daughter after her mom died unexpectedly. The grief representation and some of the dynamics between Mike and his daughter reminded me of my experience with parenting through grief.
-Speaking of grief, the mental health representation in this book was handled so well, from therapy sessions on page to seeing Rory process her trauma around disordered eating and panic attacks.
-There were some funny moments, and I enjoyed the lighter moments of Rory’s inner dialogue.
-The found family for both characters helped them cope with more challenging family dynamics (Mike’s in-laws & Rory’s mother).
Things I didn’t like:
-Could see the third act breakup coming from a mile away, with incredibly childish and immature reactions to the situation.
-This book could have been 50-75 pages shorter – it just felt like it dragged on at points.

Thank you Netgalley & Forever for the ARC.