3.5 rounded up to a 4 ⭐️
I was glad to be back in Willow Creek with all the great characters.

Well Met was a 3 star book for me. I kept going with the series because I loved the small town and the Renaissance faire theme.

I really enjoyed the plot in this book. While I did guess the cat fishing from the start it was still fun to see how it would play out.

Stacey was one of my favorite supporting character from Well Met. Her personality was so fun and made this book much easier to get into in my opinion.
I also really loved Daniel!

Overall I really enjoyed this book and I preferred it over the first. I’m looking forward to the next one.

I wasn't Aware this was book 2 but found it easy to get into. was well written and easy to like. characters were likeable

While I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Well Met, it was still a decent read. I didn’t care much for the MC this time but the writing and setting was still done well and I will definitely be continuing onto the next book.

This was the perfect follow up to Well Met. The story of mistaken identity worked surprisingly well in the contemporary setting. Jen DeLuca does a wonderful job of incorporating the atmosphere of the ren faire into the stories in this series. I loved getting a glimpse of characters we met in the previous book, but the book can be read as a standalone novel. Highly entertaining, sweet, and quick to read.

*** 2.5 STARS ***

Well Played was actually a very cute story and I did enjoy it. I still really love how this series is set at a renaissance faire. I've never been to one myself so for me it's still a very unique and interesting setting. Overall, this book was also an incredibly quick and easy read and I really like Jen DeLuca's style of writing. However, one of the tropes in this book was catfishing and that's something that makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Even after the situation was kind of cleared up, I still couldn't get it out of my head and it just left a very bad taste in my mouth and in my opinion, it kind of destroyed the whole story.

Without the catfishing situation, this book would've easily been a four star read for me but now I simply can't rate it more than 2.5 stars. Nevertheless, I definitely will be checking out the next book in this series once it comes out since it's not going to be about the same two characters. I really enjoyed Well Met, the first book in this series, and love April and Mitch who will be the protagonists of the next part which is why I'm confident I'll enjoy the third book a lot more than this one.

After enjoying Well Met last year, I looked forward to a return to Willow Creek for the Renaissance Faire. While this follow up had it's share of humor and romantic moments, I had a hard time getting past the catfishing theme and that it was glossed over/forgiven so easily and quickly, ultimately leading to an unbelievable resolution. I'm sad this did not work for me but, I will be back for the next in the series!

Probably a 3.5
I like the setting for this series.
I do appreciate that book 1 flowed into book 2, though you don't have to read book 1 to read this one.
The falling for someone else on email is a little over done at this point, but there are some fun twists due to the setting.
If you like Tessa Bailey or Abby Jimenez, this series will be one you'll enjoy.

Thanks for the review copy from Net Galley.

After the smashing success of Jen Deluca’s debut, Well Met I had the highest of hopes for Well Played. Love at a renaissance faire? The inner wench in us all can’t get enough! However, sadly that was not the case with this book. I wanted to like it, I really did. After several times giving it a rest, I pushed through and finished. The ending made it marginally better, as an infamous sea shanty took the stage.

If you had introduced this book to teenaged me, I wouldn’t have been able to read it fast enough. Girl falls in love with boy, but he’s not really who she thinks he is? Are words powerful enough to overcome the deception? Now, I’m in my mid twenties and the idea of falling in love based on nothing more than a cat fishing premise is more than a little cringe.

All in all, by the end I would rate this read a pleasant 2.75 stars. Still look forward to the next installment in the series and not ready to give up on rom coms from the ren faires.

this book wasn’t as good as the first book but i still have hope for the second book. the romance was pretty meh for me.

Well written and heartwarming, I enjoyed going back to the Ren Faire scene with all of the characters. It has a cute storyline with an adorable hero, but it was missing the spark and chemistry of the previous book.

I love books with an epistolary angle, so while the texting was the best part, I didn't understand anything that happened after the catfishing came to light. It just felt too neat and tidy, and the heroine moved on rather quickly from the deception.

Even though I didn't enjoy this one quite as much, I still look forward to reading more from this author.

It hurts me to say, but this was sadly a DNF for me. I LOVED Well Met, easily one of my favorite contemporary romances. And I was so looking forward to Stacy's book, but I did not like the catfishing plot at all. I'm still really looking forward to the third book, I cannot wait for Mitch and April's love story.

This was cute and I loved being back in this small town at the Renaissance Faire. However, there were things about the romantic relationship I found unbalanced. First, I felt the catfishing went on way too long. It went on for an entire year! Second, I found that Stacey was too apologetic and would forgive the love interest way too easily. Anytime there was a conflict due to the guy lying to her and then running away because he felt guilty, she was the one who took initiative to patch things up. And often she was the one who felt bad that she wasn’t understanding enough. The relationship felt unhealthy to me because of all of this. Im not sure each person made the other better.

I did appreciate that the characters established a good friendship and communication with each other before things turned really romantic.

One of the strongest aspects of the story other than the adorable Ren Faire setting was the realistic issues Stacey was going through. I found her personal struggles very relatable to what many young people in their 20s or 30s experience. Stacey questions her career aspects or lack of, social media persona vs real life, and body acceptance. There’s also a focus on familial obligations and how that can be both a burden and comfort zone. Her individual journey to finding her passion and leaving her safe nest made her character feel real.

Overall I enjoyed the story and I do love this world, which allowed me to look past the weakness of the premise and characters. I can’t wait for the next book as I am very interested in the couple.

loved the characters and setting. felt confident in the story even without reading the first book in the series. I would purposefully seek out other books by this author based on my experience with this story.

I didn't like this one as much as the first book in the series, Well Met, but it was still a really cute story. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.

The follow up to Well Met, Well Played, follows Emily’s best friend Stacey as she navigates her long distance love affair with fellow faire worker, Dex. After having a few summers of a purely physical relationship, they’ve decided to take things to the next level and get to know each other better, or so Stacey thinks. Who has she been texting and emailing with all summer?!

This one was such a cute read! I enjoyed it just as much if not more than Well Met. I definitely connected with Stacey more than I ever did with Emily. Stacey and I have a lot of similarities in our life, and I really appreciated that being reflected in this book. I found Stacey’s love story very relatable and think many people will too. In this digital age of dating, I think it is becoming more common for people to get to know one another through text conversations. This one had some steamy scenes which I loved of course! The steamier the better I say! Overall this one gets 4.5 stars from me!

A lighthearted story but a little slow in the beginning. You meet Stacy, Emily’s best friend, who believes she is stuck in this small town, but loves the Ren Faire put on by her friends. One drunk night, Stacy texts an old lover she met at the Faire where she starts an online relationship with him; at least she thinks it is him. In a small twist of fate, she discovers the true identity of the man she has been sharing her secrets with for an entire year. But, can she trust someone who lied to her?

This series is fun and light with likable characters. I am hoping the next book will be about April and maybe Mitch...they would make an interesting match.

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy.

I really really loved Well Played - it is one of my favorite romances! Stacey was a pill, this book was slow & I just had to scrape by to get through it. Such a bummer and I'm so sad it wasn't a winner for me. I am still looking forward to more books in this series.

Stacey lives for the summers Renaissance Faire, where she can play, dance, sing and act like a completely different person. She longs for more out of her life but feels like she needs to stay in her hometown to be close to her mother after a health scare. After having a very superficial fling with a fellow Faire performer, she ends up in a pen pal relationship making her feel things that she never knew she could. As she counts down the days to the next years Faire and the wedding of her best friends, she finds out that things are not exactly as they seem.

The one problem that I can see from this story – is the obvious cat-fishing. No matter what “reasons” or crossed communication there were between the characters, it is a pretty serious thing to do and I don’t feel like it was really addressed.

It is the second book in the series but can easily be read as a standalone. I did enjoy it and I would read the others in the series.

I absolutely loved Well Met last year, so I was very excited to jump into the second book of this series with Well Played.

It’s always fun to see how characters from previous books are doing, and revisit a fun setting like Willow Creek for the Renaissance Fair. I think this was my first book series featuring a romance with that as the major setting and I love it!

Shy but charming Daniel Mac Lean and Anastasia are the new love interests in this story, and they are so sweet and overall an enjoyable couple to root for, but I may have enjoyed Well Met just a bit more, or fallen more for Emily and Simon.

*many thanks to Berkley and Netgalley for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own

Thank you to the publisher for an early release e-arc of Well Played by, Jen DeLuca. This is a second book In a series that I really enjoyed its predecessor, Well Met. Well Played was very anti climatic for me and I saw some situations as problematic in the relationship department. I do love the whole renaissance fair vibe and DeLuca’s writing is enjoyably paced. Unfortunately this book fell very middle of the road for me and I gave it three stars.