Rating: 4/5 stars

I really liked this book. I love the complexity of both Ivy and June, and how they navigate life and high school following family tragedies. They find solace in each other and their chemistry and undeniable. It was really interesting to look into their lives and how they try to live up to what they think they need and how they manage to apply for college and get through senior year, especially when they try to follow outside their own dreams and what they want.

I do wish that Ivy and June had more enemies before lovers, and more of a build up, but I loved them regardless. I loved watching Ivy learn to ask for what she wants, and watch June learn to release all the pressure from living up to her parents' legacy.

I definitely would recommend if you want a quick and light-hearted read with messy characters and a definite YA feel. It's a great reset book without it being completely unrealistic.

i wanted to like this so much bc sports! and sapphics! but unfortunately it just didn't work for me :(

reading this felt like reading a messy first draft rather than a book in the final stages of editing before publication... i had 2 major issues with this book. the first being the characters. i love mia and javonte as supporting characters but the main character and the love interest were practically the same person just with vaguely different goals. there's a LOT of commonalities between them and just not enough differentiation between their voices for a dual perspective book. half the time i had to go back a few pages to the start of the chapter to confirm which POV i was reading.

another thing is the horrible miscommunication trope being used as a way to drive the plot / reach the climax of the story. there is SO MUCH miscommunication (or rather lack of communication at all) between the MC and LI that i was just yelling at both of them in my head the entire time. eventually they realize this and communicate better but of course they have to go through the dreaded third act breakup first. SIGH it's annoying

I really enjoyed this book as a sapphic YA romance, with lots of teen angst and lots of queer success and joy. As a warning, this book was very grief centric with both main characters having lost members of their immediate family, and that’s a frequent plot point. While overall I think the book was fairly joyful, it definitely had many emotional parts.

I also really appreciated that both MCs were women pushing the barriers in male-centric sport fields. Neither of them had a lot of pushback from being a woman or from being queer, which was a nice contrast to most other books I’ve read with women in sports. All of the tension was built up due to other things.

My biggest frustration with this book was the first couple of chapters. The author spent a lot of time setting the scene and building up the characters, but it felt very ‘telling’ rather than showing.

Overall I would recommend this book, and I look forward to reading any future books by this author!

This sapphic forbidden high school sports romance was so cute. I'm not a sports person at all and found this book to be so enjoyable. I really loved the similarities and differences between Ivy and June. I love that both girls are just trying to be the best they can in their male dominated roles. They are so good for each other. I really want more sapphic romances like this!!!

This was a fun read. I enjoyed Jennifer Dugan’s exploration of more positions in sports than being athletes. I enjoyed seeing Ivy and June’s relationship amidst the grief they carried in their personal lives.

This was such a great enemies to lovers romance. Sports are competitive, but even more so between these two rivals. Their heated exchanges quickly become something much more than sport.

First I want to give a huge thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to be an arc reader!

Let's all take a moment to appreciate that cover art.

Overall I really enjoyed my reading experience with this story. Ivy and June both have big dreams and can be inspiring in their own ways. I did find Ivy to be a little more likable; although, they both could be really frustrating at times. Much of the conflict could have been avoidable with a little honesty and communication but 'real life' is like that too. This story did a good job touching on grief and the pressure we put on ourselves. Recently I have found a love for sports romance and this was just enough to satisfy that without being "too much". This is just want I needed to pull me out of my slump.

Thank you to Netgalley and Putnam and Sons for the gifted copy!

This was a fun lil YA read. It’s sporty, it’s sapphic, and it’s a quick read!

An aspiring umpire and a baseball star form an unlikely bond and have an instant chemistry, but they aren’t supposed to date.This was a fun read, a sometimes sad read, and overall really enjoyable.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher PENGUIN GROUP Penguin Young Readers Group, and Jennifer Dugan for the eARC in exchange for an honest review! This book releases April 30, 2024.

Synopsis: June, star pitcher for her elite club baseball team, and Ivy, aspiring professional sports official, cross paths when Ivy takes a job at June's baseball game. After Ivy throws June out of the game for poor behavior, the two girls begin an enemies to friends to lovers relationship, despite their code of ethics forbidding their relationship. These two navigate sports, senior year, and whether or not they are living for themselves or their relatives who have recently died.

- Overall Rating: 4.25/5 (Rounded Down)

Review: I really enjoyed this book. Even though "Playing for Keeps" is a YA novel, it feels more at home in that space New Adult (if adopted as a more formal genre) would occupy. It explores themes of familial and self pressure and grief and the effects it can have on a teenager. "Playing for Keeps" was a very quick read with witty banter and realistic characters. It avoids some of the common pitfalls of modern YA of using dated language and references (though there are a few). Jennifer Dugan has a craft for creating a reality close to our own. Ivy and June have a distinct realness to them, but they are still very different from your average person or average WLW couple. Ivy, June, and their friends make me think of real teenagers in 2024. I truly commend Dugan for this! Everything for these two revolves around going pro with their sports. For Ivy, that's becoming a professional official. For June, it's becoming the first woman in the MLB. While these aspirations are not unheard of in the general populace, the success both of these girls have had all by their senior year of high school is few and far between. The stress both girls face, particularly June who is nursing an injured shoulder, leads to perhaps my biggest critique.

It was interesting watching Ivy and June come together. However, their communication was awful. This was one of the reasons I just couldn't give it a 5 star rating. Even though Jennifer Dugan did a great job of capturing how teenagers communicate (or rather don't), it was infuriating their inability to have a conversation without it turning into a fight. It did feel like the girls spent more time mad at each other than in love, but I think this is due to the dual POV. There are some moments where Ivy is downright cruel to June and vice-versa. It's not bad, but it is very clear it is "first true high school romance" with teenagers trying to balance the maturity needed to sustain a relationship. Ultimately, the miscommunication and anger were all rectified as the book concluded, but it did feel like they spent more time arguing than growing their relationship together.

The concept of this book was fascinating. I love baseball even though I'm not the most savvy with all the technical terms. Dugan does an excellent job making sure someone's lack of knowledge regarding baseball and soccer does not impede on their experience with this book. Sports talk, while there, is kept pretty minimal for a sports romance.

Jenifer Dugan did a great job capturing the stress of a teenage relationship and the external pressures that teenage athletes face. The miscommunication is frustrating, but it is painfully real and demonstrates Dugan's ability to craft a believable and realistic teenage romance. The ending provides a deserved pay off, but I do wish this novel was a bit longer so we could watch Ivy and June's relationship continue to blossom.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

For a girlie who isn't a big sports romance person, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked this one as much as I did. June and Ivy's rivalry didn't last until they saw each other in secret, giving plenty of cute relationship goodness. The book does a fantastic job of showcasing grief in all its stages and how two families dealt with a major death differently but also not in the most healthy ways.

Minus a star simply for the girls not communicating with one another.

I enjoyed this sports romance between June and Ivy. They learn how difficult it is to hide their romance and eventually end up on same field. They work through their conflicts of family deaths and how it affects their determination to go for what they want.

Playing for Keeps is the next in a line of good n fluffy queer contemporaries with a side of real life from Jennifer Dugan and I was happy to receive an early copy of this one and also happy to say I enjoyed it! Real quick I have to start with the cover that immediately grabbed me when I saw the reveal on Instagram, I probably have an instagram story saying somewhere along the lines of "so so pretty" or "I am sat". I love the artist that always does her YA covers they're phenomenal, never change them out please and thank you lol.

Out of the two girls, Ivy was my favorite of them, I enjoyed her character and I thought she was a little more level headed than June which I liked better. They were both messy to be fair, they're teenagers in their senior year with a lot on their shoulders so its more than allowed, but June was definitely messier (that sounds like not a word lol) and sometimes it grated on my nerves a little bit sometimes with how she acted. I loved her best friend, Javonte, I feel like he was always around to call her on her shit. He knew how she worked and processed things and he let her do so while also staying close by to pick her up when she needed it. Everybody needs a best friend like that honestly life is a lot better that way. Circling back to Ivy, I think another reason why she ended up being my favorite is because she's kinda like me. She takes care of others before herself and she often drops and runs for those she loves when they're in need despite what its gonna cost her and I also have a tendency to do that. It hit a little close to home for me that way. The synopsis leaves out the fact that this book deals a lot with Grief and its quite an important part to the story in my opinion. June lost her mom, and Ivy her older brother, both to cancer and it's honestly a big reason why they bond. The book has a big theme of "what do we do with the after, what happens after they're gone and how do we continue" Because June's desperately trying to live up to what expectations she thinks her mom might have for her AND please her grief ridden dad while Ivy runs the opposite direction from her mom trying to project her brothers lost dreams and expectations onto her. Its a back and forth pull for a while and I think it'll hit home with anybody who's ever lost a loved one, especially to cancer.

There was only a few things I wanted to be different. Specifically, I wish June's team was included more because it was obvious in the few scenes we got that they cared a lot about June and I hoped for more. Though one specific interaction of the few we did get kinda melted my heart. And I feel like a few things built up to be important didn't keep the anticipation up or be taken seriously enough and felt a little anticlimactic in turn. Its a bummer but it didn't totally affect my enjoyment either. Overall like I said, I did enjoy this one and I look forward to reading what Jennifer Dugan publishes next. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC, all opinions are of course my own!

Playing for keeps was a cute YA FF book. I enjoyed their relationship, not only with each other but with their own families and dealing with those expectations. Like most books, miscommunication was a big theme. It's frustrating, but also understandable, when the characters aren't able to talk things out. Kind of like real life.

I honestly was expecting this to be amazing, and to me, it was just “ehhhh.” I feel like listening would have made a big (positive) difference, but the book was just a little too slow for me.

The blurb from this book had me interested immediately as a woman in baseball is basically unheard of. Dugan does a good job of incorporating all the pressures of life when you're a senior in high school and feel like you have to figure out what to do for the rest of your life.

Ivy had to reorient herself when she lost her older brother and found out she loved being a official that umped soccer games at first, but when her boss calls her up to ump baseball, she thinks its the next step in her dream to become a ref in the NFL. What she doesn't expect is the star pitcher on a team that is an arrogant, entitled woman or so thinks.

June is the star pitcher for her high school team and feels a lot of pressure to conform to everyone's expectations. Her dad, her team and even her mom who died. Not to mention she's hiding how much pain she's in to meet the pressures she puts on herself and the ones she believes others are putting on her. She meet Ivy and they clash right away, but soon they realize they have more in common and start dating. Only problem is it's an ethics violation as a player and official aren't supposed to date.

They try to keep on the downlow, but someone finds out and blackmails. I hated him, Dugan did a good job of making him the bad guy. There were a lot of angst, but being teenagers, it was bound to happen and the not talking to each other and keeping it all bottled up drove me nuts, but it was on par from what I remember being in high school.

Good job on this book and making it feel real. I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to like this one because it sounded like a fun dynamic between the two characters, but it just didn't do it for me. I thought that they got together way too quickly. I would have liked some more flirty banter between them and took a bit more time to get together. We missed out on some good enemies to lovers type banter that could have happened because there wasn't enough build up. There was also a lot of importance put on the issues that both characters had with their parents. Those issues were brought up so much throughout the book and then they were resolved with the snap of a finger right after they were finally brought up to the parents. There was no hesitation. Just a you're right, I'll be a better parent. Like it was cool that they realized they were shit but it just felt off since soooo much time was spent talking about these problems. I don't know it just rushed/almost too perfect to me. Overall not my favorite book by Jennifer Dugan.

Content warning: cancer, death of parent, death of sibling, sexism, injury

Thank you to netgalley an earc in exchange for an honest review.

Forgot to review this when I actually finished it a month ago. It’s a cute lesbian romance with high school students. One plays baseball and one is an ump. Predictably, they end up in a relationship even though it violates the ump’s rules. Predictably, they get caught. They are afraid to tell the adults in their lives what is going on and so wind up in far more of a mess.
The book is sweet and I really like how it deals with grief. It isn’t a bad book, but not amazing.

An LGBT+ romance between a female baseball player and a female umpire explodes in enemies to lovers glory.
I read this super quickly and had so much fun with it. I loved reading a sports romance starring two women, and having pretty much everything genderbended.
This was such a cute LGBT+ teen rom-com and I’m sure that a lot of people are going to love this a lot.
Thank you to NetGalley and G.P Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers for an eARC of this book.

I have read several books by this author and I have not liked them. So I do not think she is for me. This book was okay. Nothing really stood out to me. I am a big fan of sports romances but this was just not for me.

One thing about me is I love Baseball another thing about me is I love Jennifer Dugan, I've read almost all the books she's published.

Playing for keeps is a young adult baseball romance that follows two main characters. Ivy is set on her dreams of becoming a famous official referee. June dreams of becoming a professional baseball pitcher and she pushes herself to be the best even when it's hurting her. When they start crushing on each other it becomes an ethics nightmare as Ivy is the umpire for June's team. Will their relationship make it or will June leave Ivy striking out?

While this is not my favorite from Jennifer Dugan it still manages to be a cute little YA romance. The main issue I have is with how many fights the two characters have. I get it creates tension but there's already a lot going on in this book that I could've dealt with a bit more cute moments.

I absolutely loved the baseball references and how a woman playing for a baseball team would be treated. It's really encouraging as I never knew a single women baseball player growing up. I didn't even know there was a U.S women's national league! I also loved learning more about women officiates. I really don't pay much attention to referees, or umpires so this was a nice way to learn more about them. Overall, this was a fun romance book that talked way more about cancer than I expected it to.