A First Look At ‘Code Violation’

Photo by Daniela Denyer Malo

I really wanted to like Code Violation by Ruth Stilling, I really did. But unfortunately, this book has now taken the place that Mile High was previously holding in my personal hall of books I simply could not get behind.

Code Violation is the second book in Sterling's hockey romance series, and on paper, there is actually a lot here that should work. Hockey players, romance, forbidden-ish dynamics (hence the title), a woman leaving a toxic relationship, a new love interest who has always treated her well...

The ingredients are there, but the execution, unfortunately, is where I struggled.

Our female protagonist leaves a toxic and abusive relationship and that should be the beginning of a story about reclaiming yourself. Instead, she leaves because her boyfriend is horrible to her again, reaches a breaking point, and then, three days later, starts hooking up with his brother.

Now, the brother is genuinely a nice guy. He has always treated her well and is clearly meant to be the safe, caring alternative to her ex. But the problem is not really him, the problem is the timing and the way the book handles it.

There is almost no space between escaping an abusive relationship and immediately entering a new romantic and sexual relationship. And rather than really questioning that, the novel largely romanticises the transition as a healthy solution. That made it incredibly difficult for me to buy into the romance, especially considering the MMC does claim he is playing the long game to get her to fall in love with him somehow.

Because if your story begins with a woman escaping an abusive relationship, I want to see her find herself again, I want to see her learn what she deserves, and I want to see her establish boundaries, rebuild her confidence and figure out who she is outside of the relationship that hurt her. And a novel with an unhealthy dynamic can very well be a wonderful sociological and relational analysis for literary fiction, but as a romance novel, it's a strangely obsessive and romanticized idea of what healing from abuse might look like. 

All in all, the way the novel is marketed might be one facet of the problem.

Add to that the fact that the book moves very quickly through all of it and with some bad writing to top it off.

The relationship develops incredibly quickly, to the point where I repeatedly found myself thinking it was a terrible idea - reading it felt like watching a train crash without being able to take your eyes off of it.

There are pregnancy scares along the way, and at one point the characters are contemplating starting a family not two weeks after she has left her previous relationship. And again, the issue isn't that people cannot fall in love quickly, of course they can.

The issue is that the novel seems to want us to see this as the ultimate romantic resolution to what came before, without spending enough time dealing with the emotional consequences of what the protagonist has just experienced. It makes the romance feel less like a woman discovering what healthy love looks like and more like the book replacing one relationship with another.

To top it all off, our female protagonist is possibly one of the most attention-seeker characters I have encountered in a romance in a while. The number of times she mentions how petite she is… "My petite frame." "My petite body." "Because I'm so petite..." and other comments of the same sort end up being so annoying, that it makes it hard to pay attention to the actual plot.

It happens so often that eventually I started noticing it every single time, which is never what you want from a character description. And unfortunately, this feeds into a larger issue I had with the dialogue generally.

A lot of it is just... cringey.

There were moments where I genuinely had to put the book down because I could not handle another line of dialogue. 

In the first chapter already, we come across some lines from the MMC saying “she was not only the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on, but also incredibly petite”, “I can show you what a real man looks like” (when discussing how she should leave her abusive ex, who’s also his brother), and her award-winning “pick me” response: “You’re literally a famous hockey player with a huge following of fans, I'm nobody to you”.

And that’s only what we find in the first chapter. I won’t even get into the writing quality for the spicier scenes because it's not good or easy to get through.

That is a particularly difficult problem for a romance novel because the entire success of the book depends on you believing in the chemistry between these people. If the dialogue makes you cringe rather than swoon, we're already fighting an uphill battle, aren’t we?

The male protagonist is actually where I thought the book had some potential. He is very much the he-falls-first character. He is completely in love with her and spends a significant amount of the book trying to convince her to enter a relationship with him.

I understand what the author is going for, as he is supposed to be persistent, devoted and completely gone for her.

But sometimes it crossed over into something that felt... slightly stalker-ish. Not abusive and not threatening, but just weirdly persistent in a situation where he clearly knows he should instead have his mind on supporting her.

There is a point where I want a character to pursue someone because the chemistry is undeniable, but I also want the other person to have enough room to make an actual decision without being goaded into it. Here, the dynamic occasionally felt less like "they can't resist each other" and more like "he is going to keep pushing until she agrees."

And considering the protagonist has literally just left an abusive relationship, I found that very uncomfortable.

And my final issue is that there isn't really much of a plot beyond the romance. The book tries to give the male protagonist a storyline outside of the relationship, but it never quite comes together.

Every now and then, we'll suddenly get a chapter about something happening in his life, such as his career, his personal circumstances, whatever else is going on, but there is so little context that it becomes difficult to understand what exactly we're supposed to take from it.

It feels as though the book knows its male protagonist needs something going on outside of the romance, what with the theme being that he is a hockey player, so it periodically drops in a subplot to remind us that he has a life.

But because it isn't developed consistently, it never becomes particularly compelling. And that’s not to mention, the author doesn’t even try with Vesper (FMC). Her entire life revolves around her former relationship and the new one.

The romance is clearly the main event. And if you're going to make the romance the entire plot, then the romance has to be really good and the writing better. For me, neither was.

Now I don't want to make the review sound harsher than it needs to be. There is a concept here and there are moments that are entertaining. It is fast-paced, easy to read and absolutely something you could finish in one sitting.

You also don't need to have read the previous book to understand what is happening, although reading it will obviously give you more context for the series as apparently each character on the team will get his own love story.

So if you're in a reading slump and want something uncomplicated, romantic and very easy to fly through, Code Violation could work. It just wasn't what I was looking for in a hockey romance.

This is not a great hockey romance, it is an entertaining hockey romance, and sometimes that is enough. Sometimes you just want to turn your brain off, read 400 pages in one sitting and watch two attractive people fall in love.

But I don't think this book should be approached expecting something particularly groundbreaking or beautifully written.

Until the next page!

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Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor