Well Played by Jen DeLuca was a lot of fun and contained a few key tropes I eat up.

Disclosure: I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. This post contains affiliate links. That means we receive a small commission at no cost to you from any purchases you make through these links.

Popular contemporary romance books and I have not been on great terms this year. Especially if the book has an illustrated cover, as you may have noticed if you look back on my reviews; it’s DNF galore. This didn’t bode well for Well Played. And, it made me think about whether or not to pick this book up, I don’t like DNFing books, I read because I enjoy it and I want to share that joy with others. But, upon consideration I decided to read it, I liked the first book and setting a book in a Renaissance Faire is too much fun to pass up.

The result? I am happily clambering into the bandwagon. Was it the greatest book? No. But, it was a lot of fun and contained a few key tropes I eat up. My favourite of these was the epistolary build up of the romance. The romance between the hero and heroine is initially built up through messages and emails, it’s only in the latter half of the book that they actually meet. Then there was the mistaken identity trope that entwined with this. The heroine wasn’t writing to the man she though she was. I don’t think this was supposed to be hidden from the reader (if it was, it was poorly disguised!), but knowing something the heroine didn’t added to my enjoyment cue evil cackle

The thing that held me back from really loving this book was the heroine. She was stagnating in her life, not sure what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go or who to go about changing that. She was stuck. I can relate to that. But, I wanted to see her pull herself up, figure her crap out and proactively make changes. Instead, she only did that when she was forced to by other people. If Stacy was left to her own devices her life would look the same on the last page of the book as it did in the first page. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her supported and encouraged by her friends, but it seemed like Stacy was waiting around a lot for life to happen to her, and when it did (through no actions of her own) she needed her friends to force her to embrace it. That isn’t to say I didn’t like her, I did, she was a funny and warm personality, but she was also a very passive one.

This was a nice, easy read, it didn’t blow my socks off, but it made me smile and I look forward to reading more in this series.

Read More

• Books by Jen DeLuca
• Review of the Well Met series
• Epistolary romances
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