Pucking Sweet

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, child abuse, emotional abuse, and illness.

Poppy is one of the narrators and protagonists of Pucking Sweet. She works as the head of PR for the Jacksonville Rays hockey team, a challenging job that she values and enjoys. For Poppy, working in PR is a positive move away from her previous role as a player in the DC political scene, where her parents raised her to be the picture-perfect wife to a powerful man. Three years before the start of the novel, she left her unfaithful fiancé and turned to working behind the media scenes, rather than as a subject of gossip and public speculation. Her preference for remaining behind the scenes affects her trajectory in the novel, as she fears what the public will think of her dating one famous hockey player and later two players on the same team, developing the tension of Pursuing Desires Despite Fear of Public Recrimination in the novel. Throughout the novel, she comes to consider her love for and desire to be with her partners openly as more important than her fear of public recrimination.

Poppy also spends much of the novel working through her troubled relationship with her family, another component of her character arc.