The Deal
by Elle Kennedy · Bloom Books · 2015
A new-adult hockey romance that engineers attachment through tight dual first-present narration, alternating Hannah and Garrett chapters so the reader occupies both sides of a slow-burn tutoring-for-fake-date bargain. It paces heat against a sexual-assault-survivor backstory, converting earned trust into payoff and banter into parasocial pull.
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 The Deal by Elle Kennedy (2015), quoted for research and commentary under fair use — a bounded window around each match, not continuous text.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Mentions of Backside
170 matches · showing 6
| Ch. | Page | Matched fragment |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | … turned me into a mindless pile of mush. “You’re staring again.” Nell’s teasing voice brings a blush to my cheeks. She’s caught me drooling over Justin on more than one occasion, and she’s one of the few … |
| 2 | 6 | … the doorway and turns his head. Oh. My. God. It’s impossible to stop the flush that rises in my cheeks. This is the first time we’ve ever made eye contact, and I don’t know how to respond. … |
| 2 | 9 | … have I never noticed that body before? But I’m noticing now. Skinny jeans cling to a round, perky ass that just screams “squeeze me,” and her V-neck sweater hugs a seriously impressive rack. I don’t have time … |
| 2 | 9 | … say it’s the gentleman in me, but that would be a lie. I want to check out her ass again, because it’s a damn sexy ass, and now that I’ve seen it I wouldn’t mind another look. … |
| 2 | 10 | … And I don’t miss the way she emphasizes my name as if to say, Ha! I know yours, asshole! She collects the rest of her books and stands up, but I don’t hand over her midterm. Instead, … |
| 3 | 14 | … his messages. Suprz meant surprise. Gyabh had taken longer to decode, but I think it meant get your ass back here? But who knows with Logan. From his perch on the couch, he grins so broadly it’s … |
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
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 29% of the indexed catalog · #118 of 180 · 1.3 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.