Off-Campus by Elle Kennedy (Spoiler Free!) Series Review

Off-Campus was a little off from five stars for me.

The Off-Campus series by Elle Kennedy is a four-part companion series which follows four different girls as they develop relationships with four college hockey team members who live together in one house. For my review, I will focus on the four main books in the series: The Deal, The Mistake, The Score, and The Goal. There is an additional novella, The Legacy, which occurs after the events of the first four novels.

The Deal focuses on Hannah Wells, who tutors Garret Graham, the hockey team captain. The Mistake centers on Grace Ivers who has a second chance romance with John Logan after a quick encounter with the hockey player during her freshman year. The Score follows Allie Hayes who has a rebound relationship with Dean Di Laurentis, the team’s most notorious player off the ice. Finally, The Goal concludes with Sabrina James, who unexpectedly becomes pregnant with hockey player John Tucker’s baby.

The Off-Campus series is popular in the sport romance sphere of the BookTok community. If someone is looking for a hockey romance book, the Off-Campus series is usually recommended. Overall, the Off-Campus series isn’t my favorite and I find the books tend to go downhill as the series go on. However, I am not in the book target audience as the characters in this book are in college, so I may have enjoyed these books more if I were younger.

Some issues I had with the Off-Campus book were the pacing and plots of the books. These tended to be inconsistent throughout the series. As a whole, however, I found myself picking these books up and putting them down again and again. For some of the books in the series, I needed to check them out from the library multiple times to finish them. For some of the stories, I found the plots to consist of a string of events that didn’t necessarily build on each other or relate to each other but only cute moments between the characters. While I do enjoy reading cute moments between love interests, they don’t carry the story for me, which is why I struggled to get through some of the books in this series.

Another aspect of these books which were slightly off-putting were some of the cringeworthy scenes and dialogue. I find this to be especially true as the series progresses. Additionally, I found some of the content in this book to be dated. On one hand, contemporary books will date themselves with references to pop culture. However, this wasn’t the biggest drawback to me. A lot of the tropes used in this book are very of the time, which is around 2016. Some of the phrases or tropes used in these books aren’t the healthiest, or they have been done so many times and this iteration didn’t offer anything unique or different to me.

Overall, my feelings towards the Off-Campus is “meh.” I don’t see myself picking up another book in the series or rereading any of the books that I already have read.

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