Review: Play On: A Soccer Romantic Comedy by Aven Ellis

Play On: A Soccer Romantic Comedy by Aven Ellis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was provided an audio copy for review via RB Media’s Listening Circle, all opinions are my own.

This follows a British aristocrat and a professional football player an a sweet romance.

Something about this didn't work for me.  The first chapter starts with Noah and Violet hitting it off perfectly.  So I immediately wondered how are we going to have a whole novel about a perfect couple unless they are split up for some silly reason.  While Violet has legitimate issues she needs to work on, and Noah has some past traumas there wasn't enough substance to either of them for me to enjoy the characters.

Violet's character really bothered me.  She has a master's degree in Art History and has been brought up in the aristocracy. Finishing university and pursuing a masters requires focus and dedication.  If Violet were the so-called butterfly her family painted her to be, flitting from one project to another, I don’t think she would have been able to finish her degrees.  This characterization just didn’t make sense to me.  I totally understand being a perfectionist and not starting something you don’t think you can do perfectly, that made sense to me.  I also can understand starting a project and abandoning it, lots of people are guilty of that for many reasons. Her inability to pursue a career seemed unrealistic.  

The dialogue between the characters was kind of cheesy and immature at times.  It didn’t make me feel the chemistry building between them, and the narration didn’t deliver on the emotion I was looking for.  The author tends to use the same words and descriptors over and over again.  For example  “hot” is often the only descriptor used instead of  mixing up the descriptors up for attractive, sensual, sexy, etc and the term “pick and mix”, is used far too often as if it is an entire character on its own.  While I’m a fan of candy, it does not make up the entirety of my personality and the basis of my relationship like it seems to with Noah and Violet.  The narrator was inconsistent with the accents between the the characters and didn’t provide much in the way of emotion for any of the characters in my opinion.  

While the overall concept of the story was cute, and the romance was sweet this one just wasn't for me.

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