Mile High (Windy City, #1)

Mile High is a work of contemporary romance, and the novel also falls under the sports romance subgenre. One of the protagonists, Evan Zanders, is a professional hockey player for the Chicago Raptors and meets his romantic interest, Stevie Shay, when she starts working as a flight attendant for the team’s private jet. In this way, the couple’s burgeoning romance takes place against the backdrop of the professional sports world, which precipitates the characters’ first meeting and incites the conflicts that complicate their evolving relationship. True to the sports romance subgenre, Mile High uses the pressures and passions of the professional sporting world to complicate the primary characters’ storylines. As Zanders attempts to balance his public persona with the new demands of his private romance, the Raptors’ hockey season acts as the primary temporal container for the narrative. The novel opens at the start of the season and closes shortly after the Raptors participate in and win the Stanley Cup Finals.

Mile High relies upon tropes for its overarching narrative plot line, as is characteristic of the contemporary romance genre. While building Zanders and Stevie’s narrative, Tomforde abides by the conventions of the typical enemies-to-lovers trope that dominates many sports romances. In this trope, the key protagonists generally begin the narrative acting in opposition to one another, but through a series of encounters that often incorporate other romance tropes, such as the meet-cute or the issue of forced proximity, they gradually overcome their initial hostility and form a romantic connection. In Mile High, Zanders and Stevie dislike each other when they first meet; Zanders doesn’t think that Stevie respects him, and Stevie thinks that Zanders is self-involved and inconsiderate. Over the course of the novel, they are forced to spend more time together on the NHL plane and discover that they have misjudged one another.

Given Tomforde’s rigid adherence to the common narrative patterns of the sports romance, the novel parallels the plots of such novels as Tessa Bailey’s Fangirl Down (2024); Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker (2022), Wildfire (2023), and Daydream (2024); Lana Ferguson’s The Game Changer (2024); Julia Connor’s Center Ice (2024); and Elle Kennedy’s Body Check (2009). Like Mile High, these novels explore the various ways in which the overarching pressures of a sports-driven narrative often inspire and complicate unlikely romantic entanglements.