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My Review:Title: Role Playing
Author: Cathy Yardley
Published by: Montlake Romance
Release Date: July 1, 2023
Format: eARC
Pages: 331
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Potential Triggers: View Spoiler »
Source: NetGalley
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2023 COYER Chapter 2, Lenoreo's 2023 Diversity Reading Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 Netgalley and Edelweiss Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N
My rating:
Blurb: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?
I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review/opinion.
4.5 stars — I kind of avoided this book b/c I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to my expectations, but the funny thing is that my expectations were kind of wrong in some ways, and it took me to places I wasn’t expecting but that seriously delighted me. So the lesson is: stop procrastinating out of fear, you might be missing something amazing.
I was a bit wary of Maggie at the start. While I enjoy grumpy/sunshine stories, occasionally the grump just baffles me. And initially I found Maggie to be almost over the top leaning on the introvert label, not sure if that makes sense. She really, truly, is anti-social, but as the story goes on you get glimpses of why she is the way she is, from her childhood upbringing to her disastrous marriage. While I will admit I kind of still wanted to learn more, I was given enough to have an idea of how those things impacted her, and how she was at a place in her life where she’d just gone full hermit. One thing I loved about Maggie is that she wasn’t perfect by any means — and specifically she wasn’t some super mom. Even at 48, she was still worrying over how she did with Kit (partially because of wounds from the ex). Which is kind of refreshing. But what we did see was that she truly wanted what was best for him, and she loved him…she was just also human and had some damage. Through her budding friendship (and more) with Aiden, we get to see the softness under her hard shell, and fell in love with her at the same time he did. She was snarky and bold, as well as caring and vulnerable.
And given I wrote a novel of a paragraph on Maggie, I bet it’ll be hard to believe that it was Aiden who truly impacted me the most in this story. He was so sweet, and caring, but had gotten used to being a bit of a doormat. He had so much he was struggling with, not the least of which was his relationship with his mom as her primary caregiver. That honestly broke my heart. His family just…was a bit of a nightmare situation when you got down to it. But it really showed how hard it can be to cut out toxic people from your life and not buy into their bullshit.
But it was his discovery (through the help of Maggie) of the ace spectrum that really hit home for me. There were so many moments where I just felt seen. I LOVED seeing the representation, and I ache for all the other aces out there who don’t even know about the spectrum, and that they’re not broken. Both the ace rep and the bisexuality rep (including his struggle with bi-erasure and all that comes with that particular brand of homophobia) were just refreshing to read about.
I adored the development of their friendship, the misunderstandings, the way things grew as they met IRL…it all just felt so real and satisfying. And the jump to more was perfect.
Lots of great nerdiness in this one, even if it isn’t my particular brand of nerdiness.
So yeah. I love it when a book hits in ways you didn’t expect.
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