Rachel Reid / ARCs / gratitude

this is sort of your kitchen sink kind of newsletter

hello lover,

I re-read Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry and The Long Game recently (Game Changers #2 and #6). Like I just finished them last night. I have already shouted all of this into Rachel’s DMs but I wanted to do it here too because if you haven’t read these books I really think you should.

Rachel recently announced that Heated Rivalry, an m/m hockey romance, has been adapted into a TV series and I don’t know if it was just the excitement of that or what but I just had to reread my two favourite hockey players (like favourite of all time, including fictional and real life players). I have a very tenuous relationship with hockey. As a Canadian, I have been surrounded by hockey and hockey fans my whole life. I have also been surrounded by hockey players. I’m not going to go into too much detail here because this is not really what this newsletter is about and I also don’t want to get into some Not All Men/Not All Hockey Players discussion, but reading hockey romances has been so healing for me. I am not sure that I will ever call myself a hockey fan — I am a baseball babe for life — but I no longer change the channel in disgust when a hockey game comes on and that’s on hockey romance authors. For real. The power y’all have.

Rachel’s Game Changers series, dismantles so much of the toxic masculinity in the sport, and I am so thankful it exists but right now I want to list the things I love about Heated Rivalry and The Long Game specifically:

1. Ilya’s obsession with Shane’s freckles

2. how Ilya thinks Shane is so boring and yet is so fucking gone for him

3. Shane’s bitchiness — more bitchy men please!

4. the mental illness and ED rep in The Long Game specifically; reading these books while I am in a deep cave of depression was so affirming. I felt so safe and seen.

5. just generally, Ilya’s intense need to be a shit disturber. Truly no notes.

Please read these books, and then go and read all the rest of Rachel’s books. Hockey will break your heart, but Rachel’s books will put you back together again.

In case you missed it…

I am looking for ARC readers for my next indie release, Most Likely to Match.

If you’re interested you can sign up here: https://www.rubybarrett.com/ruby-links

Or could I humbly ask, if you’re very excited for this book, could you preorder it? Preorders are such a huge help for authors because your preorders tell the Amazon algorithm that people want to read the book and then the book gets put in front of more people’s eyeballs.

You can preorder Most Likely to Match here: https://a.co/d/32IIIIW.

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I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to anyone who has slid into my DMs recently to tell me they enjoyed reading my books — literally any of my books. It’s no secret that I have been struggling recently. Writing and authoring is hard when the world isn’t grumbling around you, when secret police aren’t snatching innocent people off the street, when one country isn’t trying to obliterate another country, or an entire group of people, off the face of the earth. I have struggled with my mental health my whole life, but if I can be totally honest, I’ve been the lowest I’ve ever been lately.

But every once in a while, I get a message from a reader telling me they loved Lulu in The Friendship Study. “I am her!” is what I hear most often and guess what, my love, Lulu is also me, which means that you and me, we’re the same.

Or they love The Match Faker, Nick’s glasses, or Nick and Jasmine’s exploration of intimacy.

These kinds of messages are, quite literally, and a little embarrassingly, helping to keep me alive right now. You cannot imagine how much it means to me, how I feel a little less alone when I hear from you. Thank you.

If you have read The Match Faker, or any of my other books and have told me about it, thank you. If you have told SOMEONE ELSE about it, an even bigger thank you.

I am doing everything I can to keep putting words out into the world and sometimes it seems very pointless, not just because of *gestures at the world* but because often it feels like no one is listening. So when you tell me that you’ve heard me, you have breathed a little life into my fire.

Thank you thank you thank you.

xo Rubes