#CBR11 Review #09: Check, Please! Book 1: Hockey by Ngozi Ukazu


I honestly can’t tell you why I haven’t gotten into Ngozi Ukazu’s web-comic series Check, Please! before (this book is just the first 2-years of the protagonist’s story compiled into one volume), because I know I’ve heard good things about it before, and upon finally reading it I can say that I really did enjoy it a lot! It is super cute, with a lively and clean art style, and is about nice hockey bros just being bros?? Love that. Yeah, maybe it’s a little predictable at times, but I don’t mind at all as I was excited to see things unfold the way they did. Really, the only thing I could complain about is how it is a little abrupt from piece to piece, but that’s just a function of being from a web-comic that has not been pieced together into one book. So I can’t really fault it for that.

But let’s get on to what this is about! Check, Please! #1: Hockey follows Eric Bittle (or, Bitty, as he is known by his team) a former figure skater who because of his quick skating on his high school team, has been recruited by a college hockey team. He is a huge fan of baking and making video blogs about his life, school, hockey, and favourite baking recipes. This volume of the comic series therefore follows his life through the first couple years of college as he finds a place on the team, melds with his teammates, develops young-love crushes, and tries to learn how not to freeze up at the prospect of getting checked in hockey.

In addition to the main story, the end of the book includes some side-stories and fun informational comics about hockey as delivered by a couple of the other boys on the team. Honestly, these parts were hilarious because they sounded like they were delivered straight from the mouth of my sister’s hockey-loving boyfriend. As well, the characters are all for the most part very fun and lively, which made this a fun and far-too-fast read. Yeah, maybe there could be a little more complexity to some of them, but sometimes it’s nice to just get to read something without too much crazy conflict or awful characters: sometimes I just want to escape to something sweet! And sweet is exactly what this book is.

Truth be told I kind of just skimmed the last pages of the book which include all the tweets made by the character throughout the story. If these had somehow been included throughout I may have appreciated them more, but trying to figure out at the end what pieces in a big array of little sweets fit where into the story was not a mental exercise I felt like undertaking. Oh well! It’s alright, because no hard no foul, I still really enjoyed this book and will definitely be trying to keep with the web comic in the future (all of which, including the story presented here in book form, can be found here!).

[Be sure to visit the Cannonball Read main site!]

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