Pucking Around
by Emily Rath · Emily Rath Books · 2023
A why-choose hockey romance that engineers attachment by funneling a single guarded first-person heroine through forced workplace proximity with multiple book-boyfriend archetypes, metering escalation across 105 short chapters so each cliffhanger pulls the reader toward the next pairing. The buildup leans on instalove recognition and slow-revealed secrets, then cashes out in increasingly multi-partner explicit set pieces.
Engineered signals
Six estimated signals for how hard this title works the immersion engine, each scored on the same 0–100 scale so books compare directly. Directional, not exact — see the methodology below.
What this book is tagged
The full tag set, grouped by dimension. Heat & Kink and Content Warnings are the explicit signals — surfaced, not buried in a flat trope list.
Genre & Setting
Structure & POV
Relationship Tropes
Hero Archetypes
Heroine Archetypes
Heat & Kink
Content Warnings
Pairing & Orientation
Location
Estimated. These charts visualize the engineered signals — arc shape, trope weights, and the 0–100 profile are analytical estimates from automated text sampling, directional rather than exact.
Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.
Query the text itself
Beyond the scores: select a pre-determined query to read real keyword-in-context excerpts from the book’s text, located across its arc. Counts are first-pass lexical-pattern matches across the full text, refined as the analysis matures.
Excerpts are short keyword-in-context fragments from Pucking Around by Emily Rath (2023), quoted for research and commentary under fair use — a bounded window around each match, not continuous text.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Emotional
Mentions of Male Genitalia
331 matches · showing 6
| Ch. | Page | Matched fragment |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 6 | … therapist might be ready to prescribe Prozac, but Tess has a whole other kind of therapy in mind. Dick therapy. Since I got back from Seattle, she’s been on a mission to get me laid. She thinks … |
| 2 | 12 | … would be an airport pickup! UNKNOWN (5:30PM): MISSED CALL UNKNOWN (5:45PM): Look, I don’t mean to be a dick, but I can’t wait much longer. It says your flight arrived 45min ago. UNKNOWN (5:47PM): This is Dr. … |
| 3 | 21 | … Were you swimming in the ocean with daddy earlier today?” I go stiff. Wait—no. My arms—my—shit, not my dick. My dick is definitely not going stiff at hearing a gorgeous woman call me ‘daddy.’ With a groan, … |
| 8 | 63 | … time to just relax. The last few months have been crazy. Between Vicki and Poppy, we’re having our balls busted every day. If we’re not at practice or working out, we’re in endless HR meetings, travel meetings, … |
| 9 | 69 | … fuck me. My name on her lips is stronger than a shot from cupid’s bow straight to my dick. “Say it again.” She looks up at me. “We can’t do this.” “No.” I shake my head. “Say … |
| 9 | 71 | … my hat off and her fingernails drag over my scalp. It makes my whole body shudder as my dick twitches. I need to be inside her. Need to bury myself in her and never resurface. But then … |
Where the content lands
Not just how much, but where. Each content category is mapped across the chapter arc — buildup spread thin, explicit acts concentrated at the payoff chapters.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Emotional
How explicit is this, really?
A single title means little in isolation. Set against the indexed catalog, the scale of this book's explicit content becomes legible.
More explicit than 93% of the indexed catalog · #10 of 180 · 2.7 scenes / 100 pp
How these metrics are derived
The book is a real published work; the signals below are produced by sampling its text and scoring each on a common 0–100 scale, so titles can be compared on the same axes.
Estimated. Every signal on this page is an analytical estimate from automated text sampling — directional, not an exact measurement — and the arc curves are illustrative shapes, not chapter-by-chapter readings.
- Anticipation Ratio
- Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
- Explicit Density
- Explicit scenes per 100 pages — how concentrated the payoff is across the length of the book.
- POV Immersion
- How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
- Parasocial Index
- The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
- Serialization
- Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
- Escalation Slope
- How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.