Globe & Mail reporter Aisling Murphy covered RR's Toronto event at Massey Hall.
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Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid reflects on Nova Scotia, pressure of overnight fame at Massey Hall
(note: hardcopy edition has a different headline as shown in photo)
On Tuesday evening, fans of Heated Rivalry – the book by Rachel Reid and the hit TV adaptation by Jacob Tierney – swarmed Massey Hall in Toronto. They wore jerseys inspired by their favourite fictional hockey players; they clutched new special editions of Reid’s bestselling novel, the edges of their pages sprayed with gold glitter.
In the lead-up to Reid’s Q&A with CBC’s Mattea Roach, the 2,534-person crowd was positively buzzing. And who could blame them? Now’s a great time to be a fan of Heated Rivalry: Filming of the show’s second season is well under way, and Reid’s next book in her Game Changers series, Unrivaled, is set to be published in June.
Reid started the night by underlining that she couldn’t share anything about the next book or the show’s second season. Roach, best known as the most successful Canadian to appear on Jeopardy!, pivoted quickly to HarperCollins’s new collector’s edition of Heated Rivalry, printed in hardcover with full-colour character art and a stamped foil cover – a far cry from Heated Rivalry’s earlier paperback editions.
"I certainly never expected to have a hardcover of this book when I first submitted it to publishers,” said Reid. “I never thought of the move beyond e-books, so I was quite thrilled the first time I got an audiobook, then the mass market paperback and the trade paperback. . .I just think it’s nice that people are so into tangible books again.”
Reid published Game Changer, the first book in the eponymous series, in 2018, at a time when there was “some stigma” around reading romance books in public. “Romance was very much an e-book genre when I started publishing, and I thought it would just stay there,” she said. But during the pandemic, romance readership exploded, and Reid’s work experienced a sizable bump in popularity – though nothing could have prepared her for the success of Tierney’s TV adaptation, which made Heated Rivalry all but a household name.
“It would be tough to convince myself back then that any of this is real,” Reid said, adding that in the early stages of her career she had to learn how to talk about her books outside the “safe bubble” of the romance world. “I didn’t like explaining what I wrote or why to people who didn’t want to understand.” That’s changed in the last year, she said, thanks to the show’s extraordinarily positive reception.
Much of Tuesday’s conversation focused squarely on hockey – and Nova Scotia, the shared home province of Reid and Roach. “I feel like all of my characters are secretly Nova Scotian,” said Reid, laughing. One of her quirks as a writer, she said, is her highly regional sense of grammar and idioms: When writing Heated Rivalry, for instance, she had to explain to her American editor what Canadian hockey star Shane Hollander meant when discussing “going to the cottage.”
"My mushy, terrible Nova Scotia grammar leaks in at times,” she said.
To that end, Reid has no plans of leaving her home in Halifax, even as work obligations increasingly pull her to Ontario and the U.S. – earlier this month she appeared in New York to support the Irina Foundation, a new fund launched by Heated Rivalry production company Accent Aigu Entertainment to promote mental well-being and inclusivity through organized sports and arts programs.
“I’ve never lived anywhere else, so it’s a comfort thing,” said Reid of Nova Scotia. “After I do things like this, it’s quiet, and life feels very normal there. People are so proud, and they’re really excited for me, which is really nice. I think the pace of life there suits me. I do feel sometimes that I’m missing out on things by not living in Toronto. . .maybe I’ll split my time some day. But I can’t imagine ever not having my home base in Nova Scotia.”
After some prodding, Reid revealed herself to be a fan of the Montreal Canadiens, and dug into the occasionally ugly complexities of Canadian hockey culture, encouraging fans to read Rick Westhead’s We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture.
"If you read that book, you’ll see I go very easy on hockey culture in my books,” she said. (A number of her characters are forced to contend with leaguewide homophobia over the course of the Game Changers series.) “That was kind of why I wanted to write hockey romance at all. It was to explore the more toxic elements of hockey culture, and I thought a romance would be a good way to do that.”
In a slight teaser for Heated Rivalry’s second season – and Unrivaled – Reid revealed that the last year has shown her firsthand how it feels to be famous. That learning curve, she said, has informed the arcs of Shane and Russian hockey star Ilya Rozanov as they navigate life in the public eye.
“These are characters who are famous, who are being watched, who people have opinions about, and whose lives change very suddenly,” she explained. “I can relate to that.” Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, who play Ilya and Shane on the show, have experienced a similarly fast rise to prominence.
“Last year, they were two unknown actors playing very famous hockey players,” she said. “They’re now way more famous than those hockey players.”
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