Dungeons and Drama – Book Review

When it comes to romance, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to play games. A fun YA romcom full of fake dating hijinks!

Musical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway. Crucial to this plan is to bring back her high school’s spring musical, but when Riley takes her mom’s car without permission, she’s grounded and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad’s game shop.

Riley can’t waste her time working when she has a musical to save, so she convinces Nathan—a nerdy teen employee—to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she’ll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous.

But Riley didn’t realize that meant joining Nathan’s Dungeons & Dragons game…or that role playing would be so fun. Soon, Riley starts to think that flirting with Nathan doesn’t require as much acting as she would’ve thought…

This was a cute YA book! And I like the cover and this is one of the books where both the cover and the storyline are great!

Riley Morris gets grounded when she and her friend Hoshiko takes Riley’s mother’s car and drive all the way to Columbus to see a musical. Riley doesn’t have her driver’s license yet but fortunately she didn’t get stopped and didn’t get into an accident. As punishment, Riley must work at her father’s game store and not take part in any other activities. Riley is into musicals and her dream is to become a Broadway musical director. While working at the store, she meets Nathan who also goes to the same school. Nathan isn’t into musicals but he is into games and the two can’t stand each other. However, both Riley and Nathan needed help with each other–they decided to fake dating each other so they could make their respective crush in case of Riley ex-boyfriend jealous. Meanwhile, Riley is working hard to get her school approve a musical.

This was a cute read. I don’t know much about the game of D&D but by reading this book, I learned a lot about the game. I also like how the chemistry between Riley and Nathan developed throughout the story, how Riley eventually got new friends and supporters. Riley also started developing her relationship with her father as well. The book is well written, interesting and surprisingly unputdownable. Overall, I gave this book 4.5 stars.