eBook Review - Played!

I have to admit this: this was an impulse request read. I was snooping on NetGalley over the past few months to read things a little out of my comfort zone and spied this and went "Why not?". Yes, it is an adult gay romance and I want to read more LGBT reads. Plus, one of the leads in this suffers from dyslexia, I thought that this would be interesting to see how this was tackled.

Tristan has one last summer of freedom before he moves to New York and work for his father's finance company, giving up his acting career. But he has one summer and while he visits the small country town of Shamwell to set his recently deceased Danny's affairs in order, he can't help getting involved in the town's local dramatics version of Midsummer's Night Dream.

Con like to hide behind his staging. With his late diagnosed dyslexia, he doesn't even think about acting. But when an incident at a local cricket match means he has to fill a role last minute, he is thrown into Tristan's orbit, who offered to help Con learn his lines.

The more time they spend together, they begin to fall for each other, but a slip of the tongue could easily ruin them...

This is an easy, fluffy read. It was easy to read and was nice to read something that I could switch off to as I have been worrying that the last few weeks, I have been on the verge of a possible reading slump. So this was perfect for me.

HOWEVER! There is so many problems to this.

This felt very insta-lust between Tristan and Connor (Con for short) and as for the characters, primarily and secondary - oh, the characters! Most of the characters in this aren't exactly characters I cheered for. I mean, this is a romance, so we want the romantic leads to be characters we want to cheer for! We want them to be together at the end...

... but Tristan... oh, Tristan. There was potential here for character growth! I like Con (I can count on one hand how many characters I liked), but Tristan was arrogant, self-centred and a bit mean at time. And he learnt nothing. Maybe the reveal of the "slip of the tongue" was sooner (not 85-90% in the story), we had longer for them to get some resolution and it wouldn't be so rushed and so fake. Con deserved better - and there was a moment I wonder if this was going in a different direction with another character - I think I would have preferred that compared to how it went.

I think the problem with this whole story is that it had potential but it failed to reach it. I had low hopes so I wanted some fun to read, and while it was, it's hugely problematic.