Pucking Around. The Penalty Box. Pucked.

No, we're not getting all the obvious hockey puns out of our system before we dig deep on the hockey romance book genre. These are actual best-selling book titles.

If you've perused the romance section of any book store lately, you've likely noticed some of these not-so-subtle covers interspersed amongst the more classic Emily Henry beach reads, Carley Fortune's summer love stories, and Sarah J. Maas' sexy fairies. 

Hockey romance books — a genre-within-a-genre-within-a-genre — are having their breakaway moment, part of the BookTok-fuelled rise in spicy romances. On TikTok, there are more than 200,000 videos about the genre tagged #hockeyromance. On Google Trends, the term "hockey romance" has been climbing steadily since 2022, mostly in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

Nearly all of the Kindle best-sellers in Amazon's sports romance list are hockey romances, and the No. 1 best-seller in its more general Kindle romance list is currently The Wingman, part of Stephanie Archer's Vancouver Storm series. And last year, Hannah Grace's Icebreaker spent 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback trade fiction, coming in the No.1 spot by Dec. 31.

The books have even been credited with increasing interest in the sport. The semi-professional Australian Ice Hockey League says BookTok has helped them triple their audiences, and some teams, like The Pinkies of Toronto's beer league, frequently post videos of the players reacting to scenes in some of the popular books. 

Why are they so popular? According to marketing intelligence service K-lytics, it's because of the "broadly appealing alpha male characters." Some have credited U.S. singer Taylor Swift's relationship with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce in driving the interest in sports romance overall.

But there may be a simpler reason.

"Well, it's partially because they're hot," asserts author Jean Pace Hovey, one half of the contemporary romance writing duo that publishes under the pen name Alicia Hunter Pace. Along with co-author Stephanie Jones, Hovey has written 24 romance books, and seven of them — plus a novella — are hockey romances.

And while all their romances tend to include sex scenes, they just don't compare with the hockey books, which "tend to be hotter than other genres," added Hovey, 68, of Decatur, Ala., in a drawling southern accent.

"It's the grit. It's a fast game. They don't have time to think on the ice. With the heroes, that translates to off the ice, and the heroes can be a little grittier but also very sweet."

Romance books have been enjoying a surge in popularity in recent years, driven largely by Gen Z readers, according to NPR. On TikTok, the tag #RomanceRecs has more than 390 million views, industry group BookNet Canada notes.

BookNet Canada's research shows romance book sales in Canada jumped 54 per cent in 2022, and continue to climb. Most of the top-10 selling fiction books in Canada in 2023, according to BookNet Canada, were romance titles and "romantasy," a genre that combines romance and fantasy. 

And Icebreaker, about how "sparks fly when a competitive figure skater and hockey team captain are forced to share a rink," was No. 6 on the list.

What's funny is that hockey romance books tend to be barely about hockey itself, and more about the tropes and archetypes hockey can provide, said Duncan Stewart, a consumer-forecasting analyst for Deloitte who lives in Toronto and specializes in media and technology, including book publishing.

The characters are hockey players, they have hockey games and they talk about things like the draft, Stewart stipulated.

"But beyond that, there's not a lot hockey in it. There's almost no actual game play," Stewart said.

In that way, the books aren't dissimilar from the classic romance trope of a young woman who moves back to her small town and falls in love with a local lumberjack, he added.

"They don't spend much time talking about him actually cutting down trees. It's a character type."

Hovey admits she didn't know much, if anything, about hockey when she co-wrote her first hockey romance novella, Nikolai's Noel, in Alabama, where college football is life.

"We are not a hockey people in Alabama," she said.

But after the Crimson Tide lost the Iron Bowl at home to its rival the Auburn Tigers thanks to the infamous "kick six" in 2013, Hovey and Jones could barely stand the coverage — which was everywhere. That's when Jones started watching hockey, instead.

"My writing partner said, 'I want to write a hockey novella.' And I said,' we don't know anything about hockey!'" Hovey said with a laugh.

At that point, the duo had already written several other romance titles, including a few about football, and a short story about baseball. But nothing on hockey.

"Long story short, she talked me into it. Of course, I had to take a deep dive into the research."

That research included opening up her home to billet junior hockey players for four years, Hovey said. Meanwhile, Nikolai's Noel did "very well," she added. So when they finished the rest of the Brothers of Beauford Bend series (which was otherwise not about hockey), they wrote an entire other hockey romance series called Nashville Sound, followed by another: the Good Southern Women series.

"Of course, now I know a hell of a lot more about hockey than I ever thought I would," Hovey said.

There are some downsides to the genre's popularity, however.

If the hockey romance did already happen to be on your radar, it could be due to a controversy last year involving the Seattle Kraken's Alex Wennberg. As the Rolling Stone put it in August 2023, "For months, BookTokers have been posting thirsty fan edits about Wennberg and other Kraken players."

According to the New York Post, some Booktokers used Wennberg as a "proxy" for a character, and were "fixated" on him. The Kraken even got into it, posting some now-deleted videos of Wennberg walking in slow motion, according to ESPN.

Wennberg's wife, Felicia, complained on Instagram, saying some of the comments about her husband were "predatory and exploiting." Wennberg himself eventually released a statement a few days later, saying, "Enough of sexual harassment, and harassment of our character and our relationship. Thank you for your understanding."

"BookTok is super horny," explained romance author Farah Heron on CBC's Commotion last August. First it was about fantasy romance, then extra spicy contemporary romance, and now hockey is having its moment, she added.

"Hockey is actually the biggest sports subgenre in romance outside of Canada. It's not just Canadians reading it…. It's places where hockey isn't the most popular sport," Heron said.

The author urged fans to treat people with respect.

"Authors are creating make-believe people for you to thirst all you want. You can write and talk about anything you want about these make-believe people. But when you're talking about real people, you're crossing a line."