DiscoDollyDeb
I highly recommend the Contested Possession series of m/m sports (Australian football) romances by new-to-me author Sasha Avice: it was Bad Decisions Book Club on several nights because the books are so good—well-written, angsty, nuanced (Avice isn’t afraid of getting her characters into tangled & messy situations), deeply-emotional, and cleverly constructed—I could not make myself put them down. All of the books are highly recommended—and the fifth book, WE WERE NEVER LOVERS, is on my list of favorite books of 2025. I do recommend reading the books in order because characters, incidents, and situations recur, often shown in a different light or from a different perspective. The first three books in the Contested Possession series—MY BOYFRIEND’S ROOKIE, BECAUSE HE’S MY GUY, and YOU COULD DO BETTER—trace the end of one relationship and the start of two others (CW/TW: there is emotional cheating involved). MY BOYFRIEND’S ROOKIE and BECAUSE HE’S MY GUY trace the break-up of a long-term (ten years) relationship, while YOU COULD DO BETTER shows the MC who was left behind getting his HEA. Avice does such a good job of peeling back the layers that, when one MC does something utterly reprehensible, we can’t approve of what he does, but we can understand what drove him to do it. I really liked how Avice manages not to make anyone a complete villain in the books, but shows how the stresses of being closeted, being in an open relationship (for the wrong reasons), and suddenly being faced with an unexpected, overwhelming cataclysm of emotion causes a long-established relationship to crumble.
There’s a different couple in the fourth book, THIS IS MY CHURCH, a friends-to-lovers-to-estranged-teammates-back-to-friends-and-finally-back-to-lovers story in which teammates (one self-destructive & self-indulgent but a brilliant athlete, the other serious, deeply-religious and pretty much a journeyman player) experience an opposites-attract affair.
I loved, loved, loved everything about WE WERE NEVER LOVERS, the fifth book in the Contested Possession series. Not only is this brilliantly-written, uber-angsty story one of the best explorations of the amnesia trope I’ve read since N.R. Walker’s Missing Pieces trilogy, but it also squarely addresses issues of racism (one MC is First Nations/Aboriginal) and homophobia (both MCs are closeted) in professional sports without being heavy-handed or detracting from the romance. This is a story where the “big mis” truly is a “big mis” and has had long implications. A favorite read of 2025. Highly recommended.
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