Rarely has a romance between literature and film or television been so meteoric and widely discussed around the world. One of the few books to achieve global bestseller status in such a short time thanks to an audiovisual adaptation is Game Changers (six volumes) by Rachel Reid (45 years old / Canada, 1980), adapted as Heated Rivalry, which will be published in Spanish by Montena starting February 24, 2026. It’s the story of the game of awakening unexpected attraction, leading to the discovery of love: attraction, desire, seduction, sex, the game, feelings, doubts, and… vulnerability in the face of love, self-protection mechanisms, self-discovery, and, above all, the mutual recognition of what two players in the professional ice hockey league in Canada and the United States feel and want: one gay and the other bisexual.

Heated Rivalry is a double surprise, because in just one month, since the premiere of the six-part series in Canada (Crave) and the United States (HBO) on November 28, 2025, it entered The New York Times bestseller list and unexpectedly became an international phenomenon. It has already begun airing rapidly in different countries and languages ​​on their respective platforms. Likewise, all the novels in the series have begun their climb up the bestseller lists.

Heated Rivalry is considered a cultural phenomenon due to the buzz it has generated in terms of audience, book sales, media coverage, and the rapid growth of its social media presence and the creation of a very active and ever-expanding community of fans worldwide. People have started putting quotes from the series on t-shirts, and according to statistics, viewers are watching the show more than once. It’s a phenomenon of enthusiastic fandom and conversation, comparable only to legendary series like Lost (2004-2010) and Game of Thrones (2011-2019), also based on novels, in this case by George R. R. Martin.

Rachel Reid’s books are reminiscent of other literary works where same-sex couples live out their romances in secret and which have been successfully adapted for film, such as Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain; Patricia Highsmith’s novels Carol and E. M. Forster’s Maurice; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; and Alice Oseman’s graphic novel Hearstopper, which became a television series in 2023. There are also plays like Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, which was adapted into the film Moonlight.

Cartography of Desire and Feelings

The books and the series, which will have a second season, portray the world of desire, seduction, passion, love, and the difficulties of experiencing all of this among players in the professional ice hockey league, and the homophobia within the sport in Canada and the United States. The two protagonists are captains of rival teams who have a clandestine relationship that begins with the discovery and play of attraction, the novel insecurity surrounding their feelings, desire, and sexual relations, and evolves toward acceptance and recognition of their mutual feelings.

The series is directed by Canadian writer and director Jacob Tierney and stars Hudson Williams (as Shane Hollander) and Connor Storrie (as Ilya Rozanov), both already established stars.

Some analysts suggest that part of the series’ success stems from its portrayal of the two main characters, and other supporting characters, as masculine gay and bisexual men who experience their passions and feelings naturally, just as heterosexuals would. They emphasize that these are experiences that make everyone equal, regardless of sex or gender, but that in this case, the players must live their lives in secret due to societal and sporting prejudices.

Beyond the LGBTQ+ community, the series’ immense popularity is largely due to women. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the success of this gay storyline “reveals women’s desire for sex and romance without violence or hierarchy”.

But what does the fact that so many women fantasize about gay sex say about gender relations in 2026 The Guardian asks: “The fervent popularity of Heated Rivalry suggests that, for many, true romance isn’t sex and romance with dragons and fairies, but sex and romance without misogyny or gender hierarchy. If the only way to achieve that in today’s media landscape is through sex and romance without women, they’ll accept it”.

History of the six novels

Rachel Reid published the first volume of this romantic series in 2018 and, following its success, has already announced the seventh installment. The Canadian author creates a kind of map or catalog of different non-heterosexual relationships in the world of ice hockey. The books are:

Game Changer (2018): Scott Hunter, a professional hockey player in the US, falls in love with barista Kip Grady.

Heated Rivalry (2019): Shane Hollander, captain of the Montreal Voyagers in Canada, begins a tumultuous relationship with the arrogant Ilya Rozanov, Russian captain of the Boston Bears, which lasts almost a decade with clandestine hotel rendezvous when their teams face off. This is the book on which the first season of the television series is based.

Tough Guy (2020): Ryan Price, star of the Toronto Guardians, reconnects with his high school sweetheart, musician Fabian Salah.

Common Goal (2020): Hockey goalie Eric Bannett acknowledges his attraction to other men and begins dating some, including Kyle Swift, a younger graduate student and bartender.

Role Model (2021): Troy Barrett is transferred to a struggling team in the league, where he develops feelings for social media manager Harris Drover.

The Long Game (2022): The story returns to Shane Hollander (gay) and Ilya Rozanov (bisexual), who have accepted their feelings and want to be open about their relationship, especially Ilya.

Unrivaled (2026): This book is scheduled for release in the summer or September of 2026. Reid began writing this installment before the series aired.

The New York Times notes that although Heated Rivalry was published in 2019, it took almost a year to gain traction: “Then, romance novelist Cat Sebastian, one of Reid’s favorite authors, recommended it on social media. ‘That was a real turning point,’ Reid said. Readers began to discover her work. Each subsequent release reached a slightly larger audience, and in 2023, The Long Game, the sixth book in the series, which continues Shane and Ilya’s story, made the USA Today bestseller list”.

By 2026, Rachel Reid’s six books began climbing the bestseller lists in every country where they were published, some with rapid translations to capitalize on the series’ popularity and the challenges faced by Shane Holander and Ilya Rozanov.

A Meteoric Rise to Success

Due to its unexpected and rapid success, in just two months, audiovisual platforms and publishers around the world accelerated the release of the series and the purchase of rights to the books and their translations.

“I’m still in shock, and every day it all gets more intense. (…) It’s been difficult to write lately because there have been so many distractions. I’m trying to focus on the book version of the characters, not the series. (…) I’m writing a book about two characters that the whole world cares about. I feel like it’s too much responsibility to be the one who decides what happens to them. So I feel pressure”, Rachel Reid admitted on January 15, 2026. The author expressed this in an interview with What Chaos!, an ice hockey show on YouTube hosted by Pete Blackburn and DJ Bean.

The novels were published quietly between 2018 and 2022, primarily in digital format. On November 28, 2025, the Canadian platform Crave premiered the six-episode series as Heated Rivalry. By the time the second episode aired a week later, the audience had grown significantly, so much so that by the time the final episode aired at the end of December, it was a resounding success. By then, HBO Max had already acquired the rights and secured a second season. It has been a success not only with viewers but also in terms of audience engagement and social media activity, across all types of media, and in the sale of broadcasting rights in other countries that have moved up their air dates.

Something similar has happened in the publishing world. In mid-December, Rachel Reid’s novels entered the bestseller lists of newspapers such as The New York Times, Toronto Star, and USA Today. Meanwhile, bookstores have been in constant demand for printed copies because the success took everyone by surprise.

The rights to the books are being negotiated in different countries and multiple languages. In 2018, the Canadian publisher Carina Press, a digital-first imprint of Harlequin Books, founded in 2010, took a chance on Game Changers. Carina Press specializes in romance and adult fiction, including genres such as science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, LGBTQ+, and erotic romance. According to studies, romance novels and their various subgenres are sold primarily as ebooks and audiobooks.

Book History

Rachel Reid, whose real name is Rachel Goguen, has been an ice hockey enthusiast since childhood. “I always wanted to be one of the boys. I thought learning about hockey would make me respected, which was ridiculous,” the novelist told The New York Times. She even played a single season at age 14, but on a boys’ team because there wasn’t a girls’ team in her city: “I went to hockey camps, I did power skating; anything that would let me use the equipment. It was terrible, but I got to play enough to know what it felt like”, Rachel Reid continued her story to the New Yorker newspaper. Her experience wasn’t easy because she suffered some “sexual assaults and inappropriate conduct that Hockey Canada failed to address”.

One question always lingered: What would it mean to be a closeted player in a league with such a homophobic culture? “I thought a lot about how someone would feel if they came out. And then I started thinking about the ripple effect: What would happen to the other players?”. Beyond hockey, writes The New York Times, the books have given Rachel Reid “a space to address patriarchy and toxic masculinity more broadly: ‘Hockey culture is just one part of a much larger problem, but I know it well”.

The success has been unexpected for everything. “Maybe it came at the right time”, Rachel Reid tells Pete Blackburn and DJ Bean on What Chaos! She still expresses her amazement at the impact of the series and the new readers of her books:

“There are so many people talking about the show, so many memes, so many clips from the show, so many people quoting it for so many different reasons, talking about the characters that I often forget they came from my imagination”. Regarding the adaptation, he says he trusted director Jacob Tierney: “He completely understood the characters and the story immediately”.

The novels originated from his own life, but he later realized there weren’t many hockey romance novels: “I hate research, and I know a lot about hockey, and I thought I could use that for something like this. I always wanted to be a hockey journalist. I never did, and now I can write about hockey in a very different way”.

The catalyst was when he came up with the idea of ​​a story about the first NHL (National Hockey League) player to come out as gay, something that hasn’t happened in real life: “And this became Game Changers, the story of Scott and Kipp. And from there, the rest of the ideas for the other novels came about. It was something I’d thought about for a long time, and I wanted to try it”.

The author attributes part of the success to the story’s setting in a highly male-dominated and patriarchal environment: “The brotherhood of hockey players appeals to me. It’s a very emotional sport, and although there’s a lot of pressure to conform and be a certain way, there’s still a lot of emotional vulnerability in hockey. There are many players who can’t stop touching each other, very affectionately, like a male friendship. I think it’s very sweet, and all those things make it a good setting for a romance”.

The overwhelming success since November 28th has brought some challenges to finishing the seventh and final volume of the series: “It’s been difficult to write lately because there have been so many distractions, but I’m making a real effort to give myself the quality time I need to sit down with the characters and write them. I wrote a large part of this book before the series came out, thank God, but I wish I had written more. I thought, ‘It’ll be fun for a few weeks while the series is on, and then I can get back to writing my little book’, but it didn’t turn out that way. It’s been crazy ever since”.

So how does she deal with all the media attention, the readers, and the fans of the series? “I’m in a very special situation that most authors are unaware of. I’m writing a book about two characters that the whole world cares about. So I feel like it’s a huge responsibility to be the one who decides what happens to them. So I feel pressure. But I’m having fun writing them again. I try not to think about the show. I try to pretend there’s no show and no fans and that I’m just writing a book for myself, because otherwise, I think it’s too much”.

Rachel Reid tries not to think too much about the actors who play Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, “because I try to focus on the book version of the characters, not the show. There are subtle differences in the way the characters say or do things in the show compared to the book. So I try to focus on the characters I’ve been writing because I can’t change them now, as much as I’d like to. I have to stick to what I’ve already established… It’s hard not to think about how the actors did an incredible job. They’re great”.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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