Role Playing by Cathy Yardley

Format: eBook
Read: July 2025

I picked this one up based on recommendations in a video by Plant Based Bride. I’d watched a few of her videos, including her ranking of Emily Henry books, and our taste in romance seems to align quite well. I thought I’d give a few a shot!

I enjoyed this! It was an easy read, and although it made me cringe a little bit in places, the fact that the protagonists are full-grown adults was very refreshing! This is a later-in-life romance between a 48-year-old divorced mother and a 50-year-old single man struggling to care for his elderly mother.

I did like this, but there are reasons why it only gets 3.5 stars.

As you can tell from the title and the cover art, the protagonists are both gamers. They first meet playing an MMORPG. This means the book is full of stereotypical “geek” references (anime, Funko Pops, etc) and gamer banter. I don’t like a lot of pop culture references in books (it actually pulls me out of the world and feels dated), and also, everything here was so stereotypical and expected that it felt inauthentic. It got my cringe muscles twitching at times.

Sexuality is also something that comes up – gay versus bisexual versus demisexual, etc – and while I really did like the representation, I found the tone it’s written in a tad patronising. I guess it’s meant to be informative for those people unaware, but it kind of reads like the author was copy-pasting some stuff she read online.  Maybe I’m just sensitive to it because I’ve probably read the same stuff online, and I think I am definitely in the demisexual corner myself. Which really did make online dating a challenge, and is why I was single for 5 years, and it took dating with social distancing rules to find my husband!

As is so often the case with this type of romance story, the character depth and development are light. I liked Aiden a lot, but I did find Maggie edged into “not like other girls” territory, and she did feel immature. Her relationship with her son is also a bit much, verging on unhealthy. Some more background on what she was like pre-divorce could have helped. How and when did she get into gaming? Is that how she coped?

Likewise, Aidan’s family dynamics were incomprehensible to me. I was even more confused towards the end of the book, but perhaps if I’d lived in a small town in America, I would have made more sense. It also seemed like literally everybody in this town was an obnoxious extrovert, and only Aiden and Maggie were introverts who respected boundaries.

The plot is predictable, par for the course. I will applaud it for swerving the lazy miscommunication trap most books fall into nicely, probably helped by the fact that these are full-grown adults, the last point in life where they can’t be arsed to fuck about.

Overall, though, this is a pleasant read but ultimately forgettable. The romance aspect built up quite well, though it does move extremely quickly from like 2 online text chats to “omg you’re my best friend.”