BOOK REVIEW: The Long Game

Adalyn Reyes has spent years perfecting her daily routine: wake up at dawn, drive to the Miami Flames FC offices, try her hardest to leave a mark, go home, and repeat. But her routine is disrupted when a video of her in an altercation with the team’s mascot goes viral. Rather than fire her, the team’s owner—who happens to be her father—sends Adalyn to middle-of-nowhere North Carolina, where she’s tasked with turning around the struggling local soccer team, the Green Warriors, as a way to redeem herself. Her plans crumble upon discovering that the players wear tutus to practice (impractical), keep pet goats (messy), and are terrified of Adalyn (counterproductive), and are nine-year-old kids. To make things worse, also in town is Cameron Caldani, goalkeeping prodigy whose presence is somewhat of a mystery. Cam is the perfect candidate to help Adalyn, but after one very unfortunate first encounter involving a rooster, Cam’s leg, and Adalyn’s bumper, he’s also set on running her out of town. But banishment is not an option for Adalyn. Not again. Helping this ragtag children’s team is her road to redemption, and she is playing the long game. With or without Cam’s help.

Spoiler Free:

A highly-strung daughter of the MLS team, Miami Flames, owner could only aspire to the team being hers one day. If only she worked hard, showed up every day, and followed her father’s orders it will be. That’s all she needs to do; fall in line and wait for her time. But when a video involving her physical altercation with the team’s mascot goes viral, Adalyn is sent away to a small town in North Carolina as an effort of damage control.

Tasked with reviving a local soccer team, Adalyn agrees to the assignment knowing if she can prove herself, her father will finally give his approval. She’s terrified when she finds out the soccer team isn’t made up of professionals, but instead of nine-year old girls who refuse to take off their tutu, have a goat as their best friend, and all think she’s a monster in her pant suit and heels. Adding pain onto injury, their coach is Cameron Caldani, goalkeeper prodigy. Though undiscovered by the rest of the town, Adalyn knows who he is and her very presence threatens his secret. To Cameron, she only brings problems. To Adalyn, there can only be solutions and success or her whole life she’s worked for will crumble.

The Long Game follows the formula Elena Armas follows in each of her books. This three-act structure is very similar. The characters and setting in Armas’s books are what differ them from one another. I really enjoyed both. For starters, the story is set in a small North Carolina town, filled with trees and nature. Reading this book in October, I am very much in the fall mood and reading this only grew that warm fuzzy feeling in my chest. Think cold nights, fall festivals with fun drinks, pumpkins and orange leaves, and best of all a Miami girl shivering in the cold asking for a grumpy man dressed in coats and undershirts draping his coat over her shoulder. Its enough to swoon over.

I’ll be honest and say the characters in her previous novel The American Roommate Experient were not my favorite, like at all. I think Armas redeemed herself here a little bit. There are still some character traits I’d comment on, but I’ll get into that in the spoiler section. Just know I loved Cameron.

This is a book that will guide you through a very cut and dry plotline, one that is even predictable, but one that still makes you want to keep reading and swoon in all the right places.

Spoilers Full:

Alrighty- let’s get into some spoilers.

I don’t want to ruin anything so here is your warning…

I’m not holding back.

If you haven't read, retreat back to safety.

In 5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Let’s get it.

This book was good. Not great, but a book that I enjoyed reading, didn’t make me think about DNFing, or wish I could just be done with it. So, it receives four stars, which is higher than her previous novel T.A.R.E. I'm really waiting until Armas pushes her writing and plotlines more to venture into the higher fours or even 5-star level. Armas to me is always predictable and although predictable doesn’t make for bad books, they just don’t for great ones. Within her books you can almost draw out to the page when things are going to happen. When the main test is going to be introduced. When they’ll be introduced to the Main Male Character. When they reach out to the best friend about how they’re struggling. The first encounter they see a different side of one another. The first time they almost kiss, but are interrupted by an outside distraction. When they finally give in and have sex, and this is important, the next day something big happening that makes the female main character question if the MMC is exactly who she coined him to be earlier. She’ll leave saying they were never supposed to be together anyways, but later once they’ll realize their love is real and they can’t live without one another. Sometimes both of them come together like in The Long Game, but it can just be the girl like in TSLD and TARE.

So, yes, predictable. I don’t hate it, because I've read all her books and still swoon over the interactions, but I do know what is going to happen. It’s the name of the game when it comes to Armas and because of this I as the reader expect a lot from her on a character level. If we as the readers didn’t, we’d just be rereading the same book over and over again. So, let’s get into the characters. I’ll mainly touch on the two main characters, but I also have opinions of the secondary one’s as well.

Adalyn Reyes

Adalyn is a highly professional, high strung, upper-class daughter with many privileges. These type of female characters, admittingly, aren’t easy to write. There's a thin line between writing a total bitch, a cliché bitchy daughter, or totally missing the mark. A part of me thinks Armas missed the mark a little bit, especially in the beginning when introducing her character. There were many times, back-to-back, the reader was told that she doesn’t cry, she doesn’t act like that, or that things “kicked [her] into action.” Creating a charter that has ice in their veins needs to be solely dependent on how they treat people. Adalyn needed to be a strong badass, with a hard exterior that was in denial that this video affected her, but behind closed door brought tears to her eyes. She needed, at least in the beginning, to have similarities of bitter dryness with her father’s. Therefore, when she goes to NC and interacts with the kids, Cameron, and Josie we as the reader can actually watch the ice in her veins melt down. That way her character development through the book would’ve been greater. It wasn’t like I didn’t like her; I just didn’t love her at the same.

Cameron Caldani

I liked Cameron’s character a lot. I think it perfectly straddled the line between a grumpy guy with a mushy core and a complete asshole. Unlike Adalyn’s character, Cameron was personified by his behaviors. Things like how he reacted to Adalyn arriving, her beat-up cabin, having two cats because he was lonely, asking Tony for something warm aside from coffee, and building her an office in the shed. He did all of the things you hope for in a book boyfriend. I only wish we had more insight into his story. The break-in, why that was so traumatizing, his life before coming to the Green Warriors. Cameron had secrets coming to North Carolina, before meeting Adalyn and although we learn about the break-in and how his main publicized relationship was all crafted by his team, we don’t know the why or how or the deeper moving parts involved in it. And in the end, there’s only a mention in the epilogue that he’s going to therapy and feels better about that fear. Like, okay?? (Which Armas did the same thing with Lucas's character in TARE). I wished the story didn’t completely revolve around Adalyn. It felt like a missed opportunity for Adalyn's character to show some character development and show some selflessness.

The supporting characters were not my favorite in the very least. Well, I liked two. Maria and Tony. I mean how precious are they both. But Adalyn's father felt like a stone wall, her mother the classic Hispanic mother, David the classic asshole ex, Matthew was a little too self-centered for me, and Josie… I wish I liked Josie she just did everything. It got to the point where I was questioning if Armas just didn’t want to write a new character. Let’s have one character be the mayor, owner of the little league team, bakery owner, beer brewer, and goat yoga instructor. Like Good lord. I think the point was to heighten the “small town” feel, but I don’t think it got that across. Knowing the next book is going to be about Matthew and Josies story I’m really hoping Armas digs deeper in crafting their personalities. Because as they are here, they fell flat of the page for me. Of course, I’ll still read it, but a girl can hope.

I would say all in all this book was good. Act Two was much better than Act One or Act Three. Like I said above, I’m hoping going forward Armas starts challenging her craft because I’m not sure how long I can read the same book over and over again. In the end, four stars was earned here.

Elena Armas

Elena is a Spanish writer, a self-confessed hopeless romantic and a proud book hoarder. Now, she's also the author of International bestseller, Goodreads Awards Winner and soon to be adapted to film The Spanish Love Deception; and instant New York Times, Sunday Times and international bestseller The American Roommate Experiment. Her books are being translated to over 30 languages––which is bananas, if you ask her.

After years of devouring stories and posting––sometimes yelling––about them on her (books)tagram @thebibliotheque, she finally took the leap and started creating some of her own.

While she'd never describe herself as adventurous, having a degree in chemical engineering and being the Monica of her group of friends, this definitely qualifies as the most exciting yet terrifying project she has ever taken on. She's probably biting her nails as you read this. Heck, she's probably full on freaking out. But don't mind her, that's just a little of––hopefully healthy––stage fright.

ISBN-13: 978-1668011300

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