Happy Pub Day to these authors!
Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada, Frenzy Books, Tundra Books, Soho Teen, St. Martin’s Griffin, and Atria Books for providing copies of these books!
What books are you most excited for this week?
Title: Role Playing
Author: Cathy Yardley
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Montlake
Source: Firefly Books Distributed Lines
Format: Paperback
Release Date: July 1, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★
From Cathy Yardley, author of Love, Comment, Subscribe, comes an emotional rom-com about two middle-aged gamers who grow their online connection into an IRL love story.
Maggie is an unapologetically grumpy forty-eight-year-old hermit. But when her college-aged son makes her a deal—he’ll be more social if she does the same—she can’t refuse. She joins a new online gaming guild led by a friendly healer named Otter. So that nobody gets the wrong idea, she calls herself Bogwitch.
Otter is Aiden, a fifty-year-old optimist using the guild as an emotional outlet from his family drama caring for his aging mother while his brother plays house with Aiden’s ex-fiancée.
Bogwitch and Otter become fast virtual friends, but there’s a catch. Bogwitch thinks Otter is a college student. Otter assumes Bogwitch is an octogenarian.
When they finally meet face-to-face—after a rocky, shocking start—the unlikely pair of sunshine and stormy personalities grow tentatively closer. But Maggie’s previous relationships have left her bitter, and Aiden’s got a complicated past of his own.
Everything’s easier online. Can they make it work in real life?
Maggie is a forty-eight-year-old editor who lives alone after her son went away to college. Maggie makes a deal with her son to be more social, to make her son become more social at college. Though she doesn’t like many of the women in her small town, Maggie joins a local guild in an online game under the name Bogwitch. Aiden is the fifty-year-old leader of the guild Maggie joins. He’s busy trying to get his mom’s affairs in order as she’s aging. She agrees to sign the legal paperwork for him if he can bring a date to his cousin’s wedding. Aiden quickly builds a friendship with Bogwitch online, under the username Otter. Aiden assumes Bogwitch is an eighty-year-old woman, and Maggie assumes Otter is a teenage boy. Their attraction feels wrong, until they meet and discover they’re almost the same age. They both need to work through relationship problems from their past before they can commit to their own romance.
I loved that the protagonists in this romance were middle aged. Most romances have protagonists who are young adults, but new romances can begin at any age. The misunderstanding about their ages was funny and realistic. You never know who’s on the other side of your computer screen. Their reasons for thinking the age of the other person was different was logical (Maggie was recommended to Aiden as a mutual friend from his mom’s church and Maggie was told Aiden took classes at the community college). There was also some representation of the LGBTQ spectrum, which was explained to characters who didn’t understand it.
Role Playing is a fun romance!
Thank you Firefly Books Distributed Lines for providing a copy of this book.
Content warnings: death of parent, homophobia, divorce
Have you read Role Playing? What did you think of it?
Jill's Book Blog 