Well Played

Well Played (Well Met #2)- Jen DeLuca

Berkley Publishing

Release Date: September 22, 2020

Rating:

📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Stacey is jolted when her friends Simon and Emily get engaged. She knew she was putting her life on hold when she stayed in Willow Creek to care for her sick mother, but it's been years now, and even though Stacey loves spending her summers pouring drinks and flirting with patrons at the local Renaissance Faire, she wants more out of life. Stacey vows to have her life figured out by the time her friends get hitched at Faire next summer. Maybe she'll even find The One.

When Stacey imagined "The One," it never occurred to her that her summertime Faire fling, Dex MacLean, might fit the bill. While Dex is easy on the eyes onstage with his band The Dueling Kilts, Stacey has never felt an emotional connection with him. So when she receives a tender email from the typically monosyllabic hunk, she's not sure what to make of it.
 
Faire returns to Willow Creek, and Stacey comes face-to-face with the man with whom she’s exchanged hundreds of online messages over the past nine months. To Stacey's shock, it isn't Dex—she's been falling in love with a man she barely knows.

__________________________________________________________________________

For those of us who have been impatiently waiting since we read the fantastic Well Met last year, the wait is over. In Well Played we get to know Stacey, Emily's friend/wench mentor from Well Met.  When her friends Simon and Emily get engaged, Stacey's jolted to the realization that she wants a change in her life.  She's lonely, hoping for a new connection, and in a drunken moment, messages Dex MacLean, a Faire hookup who performs in the Dueling Kilts.  The two start emailing, then texting, and becoming closer as time passes.  But when Faire season comes again Stacey learns 'Dex' isn't who she's been falling in love with.  It's his cousin, band manager Daniel MacLean.  How many lies are between them and are they willing to fight for a chance at love and happiness?

Stacey was a great person to get to know, and a perfect example of the masks that people wear in their everyday lives.  She loves Faire and those few weeks of summer when she gets to put on a corset and become Beatrice.  But outside of that, her life is in a rut and she feels hemmed in by both insecurities and what she thinks other people expect from her. She feels like all her friends on social media are moving on and having great, grown-up lives, and she's not only not doing that, she's not sure what she wants anymore out of life. It's the insecurities that most of us face at least a few times in life and was well done. Stacey's also a kind and caring person, maybe a little too forgiving.  When she figures out that 'Dex' is really Daniel, she's willing to forgive him pretty quickly because of how close they've become through their emails.  He knows her better than anyone and she's more than half in love with him already.  Jen DeLuca does a great job showing how close two people can become through only the written word.  Sometimes you find yourself telling the other person things that might take years to say face to face (and as might happen face to face, the communication doesn't go as well as through the written word here)- so Stacey forgiving Daniel is no surprise, and worked for me.  Daniel himself is a little tougher to get, and he never quite does it for me.  He has romantic moments, and we get hints of his insecurities and always feeling second best to Dex.  But he doesn't jump off the page on his own.  He messes up and is willing to walk away instead of trying to fight for his relationship with Stacey.  Stacey finds herself ready to apologize for things that really, Daniel should be apologizing for.  That disappointed me. I wanted Daniel to fight to fix what he needed to fix, instead of assuming one problem means the end of everything and giving up easily. 

Once again, Jen DeLuca's writing is full of sparkling humor, emotional tugs of the heartstrings, and this time we get a pretty cute cat too.  The Faire moments are some of the best, DeLuca's love of all things Renaissance Faire come through perfectly and you wish you could step through the pages and walk down the lanes with the characters.  Her descriptions make you feel the heat, taste the dust, and hear the fiddles.  Some people might not like how much Emily and Simon show up in this book, but personally, I loved it.  I liked Well Met better than Well Played, so having Emily and Simon and the subplot of their wedding throughout this book really helped me. 

While Well Played could be read on its own, it will definitely be better if you read Well Met first- here we get Emily and Simon's wedding, see more of April and Mitch, and overall get to revisit old friends as well as make new ones this Faire season.   

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review