Play On by Samantha Young

Ok, on the real: I stayed up WAY too late reading this last night and am going to hate myself for it today at work.  What does that mean for your reading pleasure?  I’d put this somewhere in your top 5 for a quick read that takes your mind into someone else’s world.  With that being said, I have a few call outs I’d be weary of…

• The main character, Nora, kind of reminds me of Vampire Diaries’ Elena Gilbert.  She seems immature and selfish, but everyone seems to miss that and just instantly be in love with her.  She seems self aware of her selfishness at times, but usually only to call herself on it and then proceed anyway.
• The end of Part I really drove me crazy.  I promise no spoilers on the Home page, so my tongue is tied, but it felt a little bit like lazy writing to get out of a potentially messy situation.  In the end, I understand why things had to go down like they did for the book, but am still not 100% sure we couldn’t have gotten there a different way.
• As well as Rachel Higginson’s The Opposite of You, I felt like Young may have gotten a little “tie back to the title happy.”  We get it, there are lots of reason to play on in life, but I don’t need a spattering of famous quotes, self realization, and slightly awkward dialogue to say the phrase to get there.

For the parts I loved…

• The book wasn’t entirely predictable.  For the end, again no spoilers (boy this is hard…), I totally heard bells in the distance, but was glad to be wrong.  Thank you, Samantha Young, for not heading straight to church.
• The book had a normal timeline of events.  Frequently in this genre, a pair meets and is married within a couple months.  I appreciate the more realistic approach to how long it takes to feel comfortable.
• The fight topics are totally legit.  When Nora runs from her family to go to Scotland and her husband calls her on it as a fear she’ll dump him?  Absolutely would happen, and God Bless for depicting real marriage.  Fears like this fester and do get brought up at inopportune moments.  Love that silly conflict wasn’t created when legit conflict was built in.

I have Slumber (also by Samantha Young) in my “to read” pile, but kept putting it off because the book cover seems low budget B film to me, but read this on a whim when a Facebook ad shoved it in my face.  After I finished the book (sorry work for taking extra long potty breaks to get a few extra pages in), I checked the author and realized maybe I shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (hell yeah, I went there) and should try some of her other books, despite their cover art.

Clif notes version? Didn’t love the main character, but did love the book.  I’ll definitely be reading more by Samantha Young soon.