In Brief
- Narrator: Troy Duran is credited alone on a book its reviewers record as alternating dual point of view.
- Subjects: Obsessive hockey hero, fame as a cage, recovery from a controlling parent, found-family group chat.
- Tone: Hot, unhinged, and entirely unapologetic about it.
- Bottom line: Delivers the red-flag romance it advertises; the review column supplies the content warning the blurb skips.
Podium Audio dates this release to April 16, 2024, and two of the five entries beneath it went up in February of that same year. That is the first oddity on a listing with several, and it matters more than it looks, because nearly everything a browser needs to know about this audiobook sits in the review column rather than in the description.
Olivia is a pop star trying to get out from under her mother's thumb, and she says yes to one night with a hockey player who makes her dizzy with a single look. Walker Davis, nicknamed Disney because he looks like a Disney prince come to life, is a superstar goalie who turns out to be a good deal less charming than the packaging suggests. The publisher's copy says so without flinching: behind the pretty-boy exterior is a man who will do whatever it takes to get what he wants. It opens on a line of dialogue that sets the terms early, and sets them from her side: if tonight's all I get, then I'd better make it good.
Lynette Loves filed the sharpest piece of information anywhere on this listing, and it is not really a review at all but a structured card. Dark-ish hockey romance. Alternating dual point of view. Los Angeles and Dallas. A goalie in his mid-to-late twenties with brown hair and aquamarine eyes. A female lead who is a famous singer living in a literal nightmare with her mother. Anyone who wants to know what they are buying before the blurb has finished flirting should read that entry first, because it answers in six lines what the description spends four paragraphs avoiding.
Tori's four-star treats the book as a character piece about trust, recovery and personal growth, and supplies one detail the description withholds: Olivia is rebuilding a life after a restrictive conservatorship. The copy calls it her mother's thumb and the circus her life has become, which is doing a great deal of gentle work for the same situation. Of the two accounts, the reviewer's is the more accurate description of what this book is carrying.
Why The Pucking Wrong Date Works as an Audiobook
Ten hours and eighteen minutes is about right for this shape of romance, which needs room for the obsession to escalate and for the listener to work out how they feel about it. That escalation is the draw. Love Letters and Books describes the evolution from a sweet, awe-struck goalie into a morally bankrupt, possessive, protective, law-breaking figure as meteoric, then adds in capital letters that they love him for it. The book knows precisely which appetite it is feeding. R. Dawson's phrase for the two of them together is sweet but hot, which is roughly as much guidance on heat level as this page offers anybody.
Walker's fixation is the whole engine, and the copy does not disguise it: he is everywhere she goes, he keeps telling her she is the one, and wanting him might not be right but it is dangerously, deliciously wrong. R. Dawson calls him the best type of red flag and means it as praise. Readers who came for that exact register get it undiluted, and the surrounding group chat, with Lincoln and Ari and Munroe and Blake all in circulation, is plainly half the pleasure for the returning crowd.
Two of those entries predate the release date the publisher itself gives. Lynette Loves posted on February 29, 2024. R. Dawson posted from Australia on February 23. Both are long, both name characters and settings correctly, and neither could have been listening to this file at the time. A text edition reaching readers first, with the review pool carried across, is the ordinary explanation, and it is worth holding onto: the column and the audio are not describing the same object.
Weak Spots in The Pucking Wrong Date
Lindsay's three-star is the response to read before buying, because it names something the description keeps entirely to itself. The relationship works, it says, and Walker helping Olivia heal works, but the obsession with making her have a baby was uncomfortable enough to sink the rest of it. Nothing in the publisher's copy prepares anyone for that thread. If pregnancy pressure inside a possessive-hero romance is a hard line, that is the warning, and it arrived from a reader rather than from the page.
Troy Duran is the only name in the narrator credit, on a book its own reviewers record as alternating dual point of view. One reader is therefore carrying both halves across ten hours, the pop star and the goalie, in a story built entirely on the contrast between the two of them. Listeners who reach by default for paired casting in romance should note that this is a single-voice production, stated in one line on the page that is easy to scroll straight past.
Nobody here agrees on whether the book stands alone. Lynette Loves files it as a standalone. Tori opens by saying it continues the series. R. Dawson lists four returning characters by name and treats their reappearance as the reward. The listing settles nothing, since it names no series at all and gives no number, so a newcomer has no way to place it. Starting here is evidently possible; starting here and missing most of the group chat is evidently possible too. Seventeen votes stand behind the 4.4 and five of them left words, so the bulk of the crowd that graded this book said nothing about it at all.
The Right Listener for The Pucking Wrong Date
Dark hockey romance readers who want the possessive hero played straight rather than sanded down are the target, and the copy makes no attempt to hedge. So are listeners drawn to a famous-woman-in-a-cage premise, since the conservatorship thread is what Tori rates highest and what gives Olivia something to do besides react. Ten hours leaves the recovery arc real space, and more than one response treats that arc, rather than the hockey, as the reason the book works at all.
Steer clear if you want the sweet end of the sports-romance range, or if possessive behavior stops being fun the moment it turns into surveillance. Steer clear as well if the baby thread Lindsay describes would ruin it, because the description gives no notice of it whatsoever. Come for the red flag, stay for the group chat, and read Lynette Loves's card before committing ten hours to a book this page cannot even confirm is part of a series.
