Ten years after release, The Deal is still ranked #2 in Sports Romance and #1 in New Adult and College Romance on Amazon — with 126,000+ reviews against the 1,700-4,000 range typical of the genre’s other top titles. This isn’t nostalgia talk. It’s still actively outperforming books published this year
The Quick Version
The premise: Hannah Wells, a college junior, aces a philosophy exam that hockey team captain Garrett Graham fails. He needs her tutoring to keep his GPA up and stay on the team; she needs his help getting the attention of Justin, the guy she’s actually interested in. They strike a deal: tutoring for fake dating.
Series: Book 1 of the Off Campus series (2015) — all five books in the series are top 50 in Sports/New Adult Romance a decade later.
Structure: Single POV (Hannah’s), enemies-to-lovers undertone via campus reputation gap.
Why We Love It
Garrett has more depth than “cocky team captain” first suggests. His backstory — raising his siblings from age eight, inheriting responsibility that was never his choice, learning to communicate maturely despite having zero healthy relationship modeling growing up — gives weight to small moments, like walking away mid-argument specifically because he recognizes he’s too upset to talk productively, then coming back once he’s calm. That’s genuinely mature conflict de-escalation for either character in this genre, let alone a 21-year-old hockey player.
The pacing gives the relationship real room to breathe. Hannah and Garrett get together around the 60% mark — not a last-minute payoff — which means readers get actual time watching them date before the book ends, rather than a rushed confession as the climax.
What’s Worth Knowing Going In
This reads very “new adult,” and that’s polarizing on purpose. Both hosts noted their own resistance to the college-set genre generally — Garrett’s off-campus frat-adjacent house, the general chaos of early-20s decision-making — as a real barrier to enjoying this on a first read. If campus drama isn’t your thing, know that’s baked into the premise, not a flaw specific to this book.
Garrett’s father’s abuse is a genuinely heavy thread, not background color. It resurfaces in a scene where Hannah has a visible reaction to seeing the man who lied under oath about her own sexual assault case — a serious subplot in its own right that the book is juggling alongside the lighter fake-dating mechanics.
The Verdict
The reason this book is still the reference point ten years later isn’t nostalgia — it’s that the Agreement step is genuinely airtight, in a way plenty of newer fake dating books still fumble. Worth reading as the textbook example even if new-adult campus drama isn’t usually your genre.
Listen to the Full Discussion
Episode 72 | Elle Kennedy on Ice: “The Deal” & “Him” — A decade after release, The Deal still outranks nearly every new sports romance on Amazon. Checked against our FAKING IT framework, here’s why it’s still the textbook.
How This Book Nails Our FAKING IT Framework
If you want to see the full framework this is built on — including where fake dating romances typically fail these same eight steps — the FAKING IT Framework breaks down all eight in detail.
Agreement is the whole reason this book still works ten years later. Both leads get something concrete and equally weighted: Garrett passes his midterm and keeps his hockey eligibility; Hannah gets Justin’s attention. Neither is doing the other a favor — it’s a literal trade, completed and closed the moment both conditions are met. That’s the exact mutual-stakes test the framework treats as make-or-break, and it’s why the premise survives a decade of readers still finding it credible.
Falsehood works because Hannah isn’t an easy convert. She’s not impressed by Garrett’s campus reputation, barely knows who he is beyond secondhand gossip, and makes him work for every inch of access — trading tables at her waitressing job to avoid him, refusing to let him tutor her at his house. The Kiss step (their public “dating” performance) only starts to matter because Garrett has to actually earn his way into her life first, rather than her being an easy audience for his reputation.
Incident and Naysayer both route through Garrett’s father, not through the fake relationship’s stakes. Garrett’s abusive father — who left Garrett to raise his siblings at eight, physically abused Garrett’s mother, and holds tuition and equipment money over Garrett’s head as leverage — surfaces the real threat late in the book. When Garrett’s father threatens Hannah directly to force a breakup, it’s not the fake-dating premise collapsing under scrutiny; it’s an entirely separate, higher-stakes conflict hijacking the relationship’s stability. That’s a structural choice worth naming: this book’s third act isn’t about the deception being discovered, it’s about outside pressure testing what’s become real underneath it.
Truth lands as delayed rather than sudden, and both hosts flagged that as more frustrating than satisfying. Garrett reveals he turns 21 and gains access to a trust fund — meaning his father’s financial leverage was already gone before Hannah spent six weeks in silent misery over the threat. One host’s read: she deserved a real “wait, what do you mean?” reaction to that reveal, a beat the book skips past.
This book also appears on our Fake Dating Romance Books and our Friends to Lovers Romance Books recommendation pages.
And check our our review of Him by Elle Kennedy for more Elle Kennedy hockey love, but make it queer!
And check out our thoughts on the first season of Amazon Prime’s Off-Campus series:
Off Campus Season 1: The Good, the Great, and the Unnecessary Nudity?