ARC provided by the author for review
Unafraid, Unapologetic and Unforgettable, Double Play’s Heroine is a Woman For Our Times
In Double Play (Love Games #3) by Maggie Wells, Avery Preston is a women’s studies and lit professor at Wolcott College. Avery moves through the world the way most men do — unapologetic, opinionated and 100 percent clear about who she is and what she wants in this world. In her group of friends, she’s the new age-y, boho-chic academic.
She’s built a tenure-track career, but her biological clock is counting down. Not being the marrying kind, she secures a donor to have a child on her own terms. Things get complicated when the name of her donor is accidentally revealed. It happens to be someone she had a one-night fling with months before, Wolcott baseball coach Dominic Mann.
If you haven’t read the Love Games series up to this point, you gotta get on that. It’s a great time to binge read, starting with Love Game (review), followed by Play for Keeps (review), then finish up with Double Play. I’ve loved them all.
Wells has a real knack for writing kick-ass heroines. The women of Wolcott are unafraid, unapologetic and unforgettable. In a culture that worships youth, they’re grown women, closer to 45 than 25. There’s no whinging about adulting with this crew.
Avery isn’t perfect, but she’s kind of perfect for 2018. She’s the most overtly feminist of the bunch and reading her is a little bit of wish fulfillment (at least for me!). Wells almost completely flips traditional gender roles with Avery and Dom. Avery doesn’t really care what anyone beyond her closest friends think (and sometimes, even then, not really.) She can be completely oblivious about other people’s feelings and she’s moved through life doing things her way. (Gaw, how liberating would that be?) What needles me about Avery is that she’s almost willfully avoided learning anything about sports. How is that possible when her best friends work for the university’s athletics department. (C’mon, really?)
She’s not going to be for everyone (and frankly, she wouldn’t want to be). That’s kind of the point of Avery. Her first concern isn’t being nice or accommodating. It doesn’t mean she isn’t a good or caring person. I can just imagine some will purse their lips and call her “an acquired taste.” Don’t be that reader.
Dom, despite his name, is much more of a beta hero. He’s a widower and baseball coach with advanced degrees in physics. Aside from his random hookup with Avery, he’s largely walled himself off from his colleagues, making for a lonely existence. Most of his life decisions have been driven by guilt or avoiding conflict.
These two find a convenient connection at first, but then it evolves. Hookups turn into stay overs and there is something wonderful about the cognitive dissonance of all this happening while Avery is pregnant. While the physical relationship fires on all cylinders, the problem is neither is any good at talking beyond that.
And that’s where my one beef with Double Play lies. The primary conflict could be resolved if these two actually talked to each other! As in life, that’s not always easy. You ASSUME and you make an ass out of you and me. The good news is, this is romance, these two find their way and their definition of happily ever after is one to cheer for again and again.
Double Play is available now. Get Double Play on The Ripped Bodice| Amazon | Apple Books
