This book is adorable! Fun, irreverent, playful, frequently hilarious, and touchingly, innocently romantic. Thought provoking about the ways we define & value friendships, and online spaces. And omg, just so, soooo sweeet! <3
I could probably just put a whole page full of hearts here and call it a review. But as it turns out, I’ve got quite a lot to say about this :)
Looking for Group is a “nerdmance”, a sort of loving tribute to the gaming community written by an author who is himself a longtime gamer. It’s also written explicitly for that community, which as the author has pointed out in various places around the internet, tends to have a fair amount written about it, but not so much written for it. As a big fan in general of being able to find things and people you identify with in books, I found it seriously lovely that this book was written with that objective in mind for a particular group of people, even though I wasn’t a member of it.
Yet, I’m very pleased to say that though I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, it turned out that this in no way detracted from my immense enjoyment of this book.
It might help that I’m the kind of reader who’s up for a bit of challenge, linguistics wise. I’ve never minded reading books that required me to google a few words, or look them up in a glossary or foreign language dictionary. That’s not for everyone, but for me it’s a very slight investment of time & effort I’ve never regretted or failed to find rewarding and enriching, both to my reading experience, and in general.
And hey, if I needed an extra incentive, it’s Alexis Hall, folks. I’m (big secret here, I know) a huge fan of his work, so if Shakespeare and A Clockwork Orange were worth a little extra effort, that was sure to be the case for Alexis’ latest. And I wasn’t wrong.
So, the beginning of this is quite gaming intensive. The first few of pages, in particular, are thick with (for me) mostly unfamiliar gamer slang. But there’s a glossary at the back, which helps a lot. I read through it quickly before even starting the book, then came back to it as needed while reading. At first this is a bit like a cross between reading & solving a puzzle. But then you just sort of relax into it, stop worrying about looking up every word, begin picking things up from context, and it just flows.
In my case, it may have also helped that I read the excerpt of the first chapter on the publisher’s website some time ago. So, this being my second reading, it had a sense of comfortable familiarity.
You should also know that quite a lot of this book is formatted like a transcript of a text conversation between game participants. Like so:
“[Guild] [Morag]: Hi Ella
[Guild] [Ialdir]: Yo
[Guild] [Mordant]: Welcome
[Guild] [Orcarella]: Hey all, thanks for the inv”
Obviously a bit different from what we’re used to seeing in most books. But it didn’t bother me any more than reading a play with character names & stage directions does. And it wasn’t that dissimilar to the appearance of any chat window. In fact, I liked the way this approximated the feel of being in a game and felt it added some nice texture.
Honestly, the only thing that I found the least bit difficult was the gamer slang, and as said, that was easily overcome with a few lookups.
I found the gaming world itself very attractive. Reading this was probably the closest you can come to that world in a book, it was like wandering invisibly through a 3-D interactive fantasy novel, but “once removed”, as I was only observing, watching others interact, not having to interact myself. Which I actually found ideal. I’ve long been intrigued by online role playing games, but in addition to the probability that I’d completely suck at the mechanics, I’ve always found the prospect of the socially interactive facet pretty daunting. So I genuinely loved this opportunity to explore this world, in essence, by proxy.
And I found it all incredibly charming. The characters were funny & endearing; I got a kick out of the slang; I appreciated the sense of community, the team aspect, the realness of friendships. I loved the characters’ exuberance during gameplay, and actually got into the excitement of it myself. I loved too, seeing how an avatar can reflect the personality of the human behind it, yet also express aspects of that person they might not find so easy to show in “Real Life”. Case in point: Kit, who is reserved, thoughtful and a little shy in person, shows that same reflective spirit in the game as Solace, who says lovely things like this:
“Ruins are not just about loss, they’re about time [ . . .] You’ve got things that used to be something [ . . .] And now they’re something else [. . . ] I find it kind of hopeful”
(Oh! My heart! <3)
yet also who reveals his adventurous, spontaneous, flirtatious side, in scenes like this:
“Solace shuffled up so close to Orcarella that the sleeves of her robe were clipping through the dread knight’s spiky armour, and performed a winsome little animation.
[Group] [Solace]: Please?
[Group] [Solace]: Please?
[Group] [Solace]: Please?
[Group] [Solace]: I’ll heal you real good baby.”
(Squee!)
And the humor! Yep, there were a lot of gaming/nerd inside jokes, but google was my friend in making sense of those, so this book kept me laughing as much as any other Alexis Hall novel I’ve ever read. Which is to say, a LOT! I even read passages aloud that won guffaws from my husband, which is saying something, for a man who doesn’t even use email! :D
Moving beyond the gaming, I really enjoyed everything about this book. There were lots of characters, so for some of them we just get quick sketch version of who they are, & that’s fine, but the two main characters are lovingly delineated. Especially (showing bias for my favorite here), Solace/Kit, who was consistently huggable, both in & out of the game<3. The romantic scenes were lovely, tender, playful, endearingly diffident, and infused with sweetness in the very best sense of the word. And the writing itself was, of course, as always with this author, pure loveliness: Fresh, funny, thoughtful, irreverent. And also appropriately variable, changing throughout the book to suit the context of each situation, the personalities & voices of each character.
In the end, the most important thing I took from this was the way this book reflects, not just the gaming world, but the online world, examining and ultimately celebrating the value and validity of the experiences and relationships we find there.
And that’s something quite personally meaningful to me.
Highly recommended to gamers, geeks, Alexis Hall fans, any anyone else interested in reading a sweet, nerdy romance who doesn’t mind engaging with a bit of an unusual format & looking up a few words in the process.
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Top reviews from other countries
DeltaMK
A wonderful and cute love story between two gamers (and their characters)
Reviewed in Germany on April 20, 2021Norman of Manchester
All the feelz
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2021LindaMM
An Aesop fable wrapped in romance and embedded in the Game
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2022