Rachel Reid stopped by NBC News to discuss her novel Heated Rivalry and the runaway success of its television adaptation.
Reid’s novel, published in 2019 by Carina Press, an imprint of Harlequin, is the second installment in her Game Changers series of queer hockey romance novels. The book introduced rivals-turned-lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov; the couple returned in Reid’s 2022 novel, The Long Game. The Canadian television show based on the series has been a blockbuster hit for HBO Max, which streams it in the U.S.
NBC News correspondent Joe Fryer asked Reid why she thought the novel and others in the series resonate so strongly with women readers.
“Romance readers largely are women and, honestly, readers of fiction are largely women, [and] for a really long time my books and most queer romance were only in e-book format, so you really had to know where to look for them,” she said. “So the built-in fan base was women, mostly for that reason.…These books are about emotionally vulnerable men, they’re about a softer version of some of the men they might have known in their lives, and I think that’s very appealing to a lot of people.”
Earlier this week, Reid announced that the characters of Hollander and Rozanov would return in a new novel, Unrivaled, scheduled for publication by Harlequin on Sept. 29. Fryer asked Reid what she wanted her readers to know about the new book.
“The main thing, and the reason that I wanted to write it, is because Ilya and Shane have never had what we would think of as a regular relationship. Because they’ve always had to hide, and they’ve always been apart and had to grab time when they can, and now they’re together all the time,” she said. “They’re living together, they’re working together, they’re traveling together, and everybody knows about them. So this is brand new, and there are good things and bad things about it, and it was very interesting to explore.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
