Below is the complete list of Kennedy Ryan’s Hoops books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Hoops Books in Publication Order
- Long Shot (2018)
View Book - Block Shot (2018)
View Book - Hoops Holiday (2018)
View Book - Hook Shot (2019)
View Book - Fast Break (2019)
View Book - Hoops Shorts (2022)
View Book
About Hoops
Kennedy Ryan’s Hoops series takes the familiar outline of sports romance and gives it far more emotional weight than the label might suggest. Set against the world of professional basketball, these books are not simply about glamorous athletes and high-profile love affairs. They are about ambition, image, trauma, loyalty, recovery, and the private strain that lives beneath public success. Basketball gives the series its setting and momentum, but the real substance comes from the way Ryan writes people under pressure, especially when love arrives in lives already shaped by damage, discipline, and hard-won self-protection.
The core novels are Long Shot, Block Shot, and Hook Shot, with related shorter material attached to the series world. What links the main books is not one continuing couple, but a shared emotional and professional landscape. Ryan uses that structure well. Each novel stands on its own, yet the books speak to each other through recurring characters, overlapping circles, and a consistent sense of what this world costs the people living inside it. That makes the series feel connected without forcing every story into the same mold.
Long Shot is especially significant because it sets the emotional bar for everything that follows. It is one of Ryan’s most intense and difficult novels, and its reputation comes not just from romance, but from the seriousness with which it handles abuse, survival, and the long shadow of power imbalance. That gravity matters to the identity of the whole series. Hoops may be stylish and contemporary on the surface, but it is not lightweight. Ryan is interested in desire, certainly, but she is just as interested in endurance, dignity, and the ways people rebuild themselves after being pushed to the edge.
By contrast, Block Shot shifts the energy without losing depth. The basketball backdrop remains important, but the emotional current changes shape. Ryan has a strong feel for rivalry, history, and unresolved feeling, and that allows the book to explore love through tension and resistance rather than sheer devastation. The series becomes richer because it does not repeat one emotional register. Each story has its own rhythm, and Ryan is careful to let the central couple define that rhythm rather than forcing a fixed formula across the books.
Then Hook Shot broadens the series again, bringing a more mature, grounded emotional texture to its central relationship. By this point, one of the pleasures of Hoops is seeing how differently Ryan can approach romance within the same general world. The books share atmosphere, professional stakes, and thematic seriousness, but they are not interchangeable. She gives each pairing a distinct emotional architecture, and that is a large part of why the series holds up so well as a connected body of work instead of a set of near-duplicates.
Another reason Hoops stands out is the way Ryan writes sport not as decoration, but as environment. Professional basketball here is tied to travel, visibility, discipline, media pressure, wealth, and masculine performance. It shapes careers, public narratives, and intimate relationships. The players in these books are not generic athletes placed into romantic scenarios; their profession changes how they move through the world, how they are perceived, and what is expected of them. Ryan understands that a sports setting only feels convincing when it affects character, not just scenery.
The series also sits in an important place within Kennedy Ryan’s wider career. It reflects many of the qualities that define her strongest work: emotional intensity, social awareness, Black love rendered with richness and specificity, and a refusal to flatten romance into escapism alone. She allows tenderness and attraction to coexist with pain, responsibility, and the complicated realities her characters carry into the relationship.
Taken together, the Hoops books offer more than a polished look inside the orbit of professional basketball. They form a romance series with real force behind it, one that understands chemistry is only the beginning. What gives these novels their staying power is the sense that every love story must fight through history, vulnerability, and the demands of a very public world before it can become something lasting.