Riley can't waste her time working when she has a musical to save, so she convinces Nathan—a nerdy teen employee—to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she’ll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous.
But Riley didn’t realize that meant joining Nathan's Dungeons & Dragons game…or that role playing would be so fun. Soon, Riley starts to think that flirting with Nathan doesn't require as much acting as she would've thought... (Pub Date: Jan 09, 2024)
Riley is grounded after her impulsivity made her drive without a license just so she could watch a musical. Now she'll need to work with her father at the store she blames for her parents divorce and for how distant her relationship became with him. That's where she meets Nathan. They can't get along when he seems to have be closer to her father than her, but his name is so in her head it's his name she spurts when she wants to prove to her ex-boyfriend she's moved on and is seeing someone new.
Maybe I'm not really inspired to write a reasonable summary, but the story is pretty straightforward. Riley needs to mend her relationship with her father while getting to know Nathan better. And this book was a super light read, I loved the good feeling it would bring me whenever I opened it. Still, I must say this was more of a 3.5 rounded up to 4 than a solid 4.
As I said it's a good read. But maybe all those tropes together obfuscated each other? There isn't a feeling of a lot going on, but a lot was indeed going on: Riley wants to save her school's musical from being cut from the budget, she starts participating in Nathan's RPG group in order to make some other girl jealous for him, there is her broken relationship with her father too, and her lying to her parents since she wasn't supposed to be directing a play after school when she was grounded so she'd see a world outside the theater, and there are the side characters. I promise the book isn't this overwhelming, but all this mix took out a little of the emotion. Nathan and Riley are great together, but their feelings develop in the middle of so much I didn't have time to cheer them on until it was too late to cheer for anything. Most of the happenings that were supposed to be memorable became a little bland. I can't say what could have improved the experience, but it could have been better.
My other problem was with Riley herself. She does change in relation to her father, but I'm not so sure she herself changed with this journey. Didn't things just start to conspire in her favor, instead? Plus, she wasn't unbearable, but something about her was mildly irritating. She was lucky her rival was so much worse. But I'm not so sure what's the lesson to get from this despite the ending making us feel as if we should have learned something. There's the father part, but I think she'd have chosen the same before too.
Still, it's worth your time. The characters are great,there is a general feel good going on, and it's probably what made this such a light read. I liked the writer's style and I'd love to read more of her books.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment