There was a time in college when my best friend would come to my dorm room every week and we would watch WWF together. My favorite was The Rock, the people’s elbow, the eyebrow, and smelling whatever he was cookin’. I loved the theatrics and folding metal chairs of it all. It was, however, short lived and I moved on to other things. UNTIL NOW.

Lily Mayne has done it, folks, she has written a novel about monsters who perform in an underground wrestling league, Goliaths of Wrestling. And, hear me out, it’s delicious from start to finish.

Impromptu Match is an MM romance about a human and an Empyn, who meet when Taylor (human) is mistaken by Holt’s wholly incompetent assistant for Holt’s (Empyn and Golaith’s owner)…uh…hired companion.

Taylor is stuck. He’s found himself, 12 years into a job that hates, alone, and in a rut. He’s four years out from a breakup with a man, for whom he changed his life from fun and easygoing, to buttoned up and boring, only for the man to leave him for a yoga instructor. The turning point comes when Taylor sneaks away from yet another insufferable office birthday party, steals some beer, and proceeds to drink himself into a nap on the roof of the office building. When he comes to, it’s late and he’s locked out of the office. Oops. When he goes down to the lobby, to ask security to open the office, he’s stolen away by Holt’s assistant, Larkin, who is convinced that Taylor is a very specific performer. Turns out that Holt has requested a “sad office worker forced to attend a colleague’s birthday party” stripper, which is not unusual for Holt. He tends to request very specific strippers – I will let you discover those gems on your own.

Upon realizing the mistake, Holt and Taylor decide to drink the night away while sharing all of their deep dark secrets. When they wake up the next day having remembered everything – much to their dismay – they end up forging a friendship that turns into, you guessed it, the sweetest romance you ever did see. This is a low-angst, low-risk type of relationship. You’ll enjoy being fully immersed in the mushy honeymoon phase and everything that comes with it, including spice that will make you stare off into the middle distance for a little while. In fact, this is probably the spiciest book I’ve read so far from Lily. And I’m. Not. Mad. About. It.

All of the good feels aside, my favorite parts of this book were when Lily FULL SENDS long descriptions of the actual wrestling matches. Lily’s scene setting skills are impeccable in every book she writes. If you’re interested, you can read me losing my mind over it in my previous post about her Monstrous series. You will hear the roar of the crowd. You will watch each wrestling pair in technicolor. And don’t even get me started on the posters that the fans hold up! Absolutely hilarious. It’s purely cinematic.

This one got five stars from me, which is consistent across all of Lily Mayne’s books. If you want to check her out, you can click on her website here. Highly recommend literally anything that she comes out of that beautiful mind. Let me know if you’ve read this book or anything else in her back catalogue, which, I’m pleased to say, is rapidly growing.