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What: “So Your Son Wants to Play in the NHL,” by Dan Bylsma and Jay M. Bylsma

Price: $24.95, Sleeping Bear Press. Available at major area bookstores. It may also be ordered at https://www.danbylsma.com, and readers will receive autographed copies from Dan and Jay.

This is more than just a hockey book. It’s a book about life and how to use simple lessons and values for success, according to the Bylsma family. King forward Dan Bylsma is a seven-year professional hockey veteran who has made the most of his talents with hard work. Jay Bylsma and his wife, Nancy, reared Dan and his four siblings in an environment of unconditional love and competition in Grand Haven, Mich. One of the inspirations for Dan and Jay to collaborate on the book came from a popular youth hockey camp, run by Dan in Grand Haven. They noticed how parents pushed and misguided their children to try to make them hockey players. “Your responsibility as a parent is to train him for life; the NHL has to come from him,” Jay Bylsma writes.

Dan and Jay write separate passages in each chapter, and the book has a nice flow in detailing Dan’s upbringing and his journey from playing youth hockey in Canada at 15 to the NHL. Unlike some family books that become too personal and bore readers, “So Your Son Wants to Play in the NHL” has a refreshing straight-ahead approach that makes you feel that you’ve learned something. It describes the different challenges Dan has gone through on and off the ice, and because you get narrative from both him and Jay, it works--even when they disagree. (For example, Jay credits Dan’s athletic success to being blessed with superior genes; Dan says his success has come from his family and environment.)

The book ends with an epilogue by Dan, in which he explains how his wife, Mary Beth, lost their first child in January. He writes about how the episode changed his life.