Alex Ovechkin

Alex Ovechkin is the fifth title in the “Amazing Hockey Stories” series, the previous books being Connor McDavid, Hayley Wickenheiser, P. K. Subban and Mitch Marner.
While Alex Ovechkin, aka Ovi, is definitely one of the National Hockey League’s superstars, he is not an immediately obvious choice for a book aimed at a young audience, given that his first NHL season was 2005-06, a time before most of the book’s intended readers were even born.

Nicholson commences Ovechkin’s story on February 22, 2020, the date he scored his 700th goal, becoming the second fastest NHL player to reach that scoring plateau, and she concludes the book with the 2019-2020 COVID-19 shortened season. That Ovi was not a product of the North American routes to the NHL and played his amateur and initial professional hockey in Russia takes Nicholson’s content into areas not treated in the other books in the series. The book’s readers will likely be surprised to learn [See Excerpt] that Ovechkin was not a hockey prodigy.
Nicholson peppers her prose with hockey lingo that the game’s young fans will recognize, phrases such as “skated through the traffic”, “did a curl and drag”, “rifled a blasting shot”, and “chip shot from the side of the net”.

Like the other offerings in the series, Alex Ovechkin contains four multi-page graphic novel-like sections created by illustrator D. A. Bishop. These are interspersed among the text chapters with the first featuring a hockey episode from Ovi’s childhood and the last highlighting Ovechkin and the Capitals finally winning the Stanley Cup in 2018. The reader-friendly main text is printed on a blue background, and the book includes numerous full-colour action photos of Ovechkin at various points in his lengthy hockey career. Many of the text pages also contain a pair of “trivia” speech bubbles, with one containing a question and the other the answer, For example:

Why does Alex’s wear #8?

It was the number his mother wore when she played basketball.

Though Alex Ovechkin may not be picked up as quickly as Connor McDavid and Mitch Marner that feature young stars from Canadian NHL teams, the contents of Alex Ovechkin are actually meatier.