Rachel Reid

Rachel Reid is the pen name of Rachelle Goguen, a Canadian author born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose lifelong passion for ice hockey found its most powerful outlet not on the ice, but on the page. Writing under a name she chose for its simplicity over her own, Reid has become one of the most recognisable voices in M/M sports romance, building a devoted readership through her ability to ground emotional, often simmering love stories in the gritty, competitive world of professional hockey.

Growing up in Nova Scotia, Reid was immersed in hockey culture from an early age. Despite the lack of girls' hockey leagues available to her, she took power-skating lessons and found her way into any boys' camp that would accept her. That tenacity - and that love for the sport - never left her. When she eventually began writing fiction, hockey wasn't merely a setting. It was the beating heart of everything she wanted to explore: the intensity of competition, the camaraderie of the locker room, and the costs of hiding who you are in an environment that has long demanded conformity.

Reid began writing what would become her debut novel on her iPad, quietly, while putting her children to sleep. She submitted the manuscript to publishers without telling even her husband, and when Game Changer was released in 2018 through Carina Press - an imprint of Harlequin Romance - it found its audience almost immediately. Two years later, word-of-mouth championing by fellow romance authors helped propel her work to a much wider readership, and Reid's name became synonymous with the M/M hockey romance subgenre she had helped define.

The Game Changers series remains her flagship work, spanning seven novels and following a rotating cast of professional hockey players navigating love, identity, and the pressures of life in the public eye. Each book focuses on a new central romance whilst maintaining a shared world that rewards readers who follow the series from the beginning. From the sweetly charged first encounters of Game Changer to the high-stakes emotional reckoning of The Long Game, the series traces a remarkably consistent emotional intelligence alongside its undeniable heat. A seventh instalment, Unrivaled, is anticipated.

Beyond the Game Changers world, Reid has written two standalone hockey romances that demonstrate the range of her storytelling. Time to Shine (2023), a warmer and more tender novel than some of her series work, follows a quiet, introverted backup goalie and the sunny, persistent teammate who refuses to let him disappear into himself. The Shots You Take (2025) continues Reid's exploration of queer identity and connection within the high-pressure hockey world, further cementing her position as one of the genre's most consistent voices.

Reid's writing is distinguished by an emotional authenticity that goes beyond the romance genre's typical conventions. Her characters feel embedded in the specific culture of professional hockey - not just using it as a glamorous backdrop, but grappling with what it means to be queer in a sport that has historically been hostile to LGBTQ+ visibility. She has spoken openly about writing the Game Changers series partly out of frustration with hockey culture and a desire to push back against its embedded homophobia, and that intent is legible throughout the books in the best possible way: not as a lecture, but as a refusal to let her characters be defined by a sport that would rather they not exist.

Across her work, certain signature elements recur. Enemies-to-lovers dynamics - nowhere more gloriously executed than in the charged, decade-long tension of the Shane and Ilya storyline - sit alongside grumpy/sunshine pairings, found family, and slow-burn romance that earns every payoff. Her heroes are often caught between public persona and private longing, navigating the particular strain of closeted relationships within the fishbowl of professional sport. Yet Reid never lets that tension tip into tragedy. Her books are, at their core, deeply optimistic - a sustained argument that queer love deserves its happy ending just as much as any other kind.

The Game Changers series was adapted for television in 2025, with the Heated Rivalry storyline - the enemies-to-lovers romance between Canadian captain Shane Hollander and his Russian rival Ilya Rozanov - serving as the basis for the show's first season. For readers who arrived through the screen, the books offer everything the adaptation distils, and then considerably more.