Briar U

About the Briar U series

Briar U is Elle Kennedy's second trip to fictional Briar University, catching up with the hockey team a few years after the Off-Campus series and handing the spotlight to a new set of players and the women who match them shot for shot in banter. The Chase opens with a grumpy/sunshine pairing between hardened team captain Colin Fitzgerald and the effortlessly outgoing Sabrina, and the series works through classic New Adult college-romance tropes from there: a fake relationship in The Risk, forbidden roommate's-sibling tension in The Play, and a slow-burn friends-to-lovers arc in The Dare. Each book pairs a hockey player (or adjacent Briar athlete) with a strong-willed love interest, delivered in Kennedy's trademark voice: filthy-funny banter, dual first-person POV, and enough heat to earn her reputation as one of the writers who defined the modern college-sports-romance boom.

You don't need to have read Off-Campus first — Briar U is set in the same world and a couple of familiar names cameo, but the timeline has moved on and the new leads carry the story on their own. It's for readers who want low-angst, high-banter New Adult romance: campus parties, locker-room camaraderie, jealousy plots, and hockey players who are surprisingly soft for the right girl.

How to read this series

Read in publication order — The Chase, The Risk, The Play, The Dare — each following a new couple at Briar University with light cameos from earlier pairs. Briar U is a spin-off continuation of Kennedy's earlier Off-Campus series (same school, several years later) but was written to stand entirely on its own; new readers can start here without having read Off-Campus first. There's no chronological wrinkle and no strong case for reading out of publication order.