A sapphic YA sports romance? Sign me up! PLAYING FOR KEEPS follows Ivy, a high school student with dreams of being the second female NFL referee and June, a wickedly talented baseball (nope, not softball) pitcher trying to follow in the footsteps of her parents’ former ball careers. When Ivy ends up an umpire for some of June’s games, an enemies to lovers spark is undeniable. Can June and Ivy be together follow their dreams on the field? Or are they destined to strike out?

As a Jennifer Dugan super-stan, this book in particular felt heavier than her other YA romps. This book tackles familiar expectations, loss of a family member, sexism in the sports world, pressures on high school athletes, and chronic pain. While all of this topics are addressed and handled with care, PLAYING FOR KEEPS still gives you plenty of giggling, kicking my feet moments.

My only big critique of this book is that the pacing felt a little off. The enemies to lovers zipped through the enemies phase in a blink of an eye that almost turned it insta love. It left the pairing feeling a little forced through the first half of the book.

I thought this book was so stinking cute!! I'm a big fan of sapphic sports romances, so Playing for Keeps was right up my alley. With all the elements of a cute YA romance, this book also balances discussions on the pressure society places on teenagers to have their lives figured out at such a young age. Highly recommend for fans of Home Field Advantage and She Drives Me Crazy!

A really cute, easy YA read. I think the troubles both June and Ivy face are the realty of a lot of high school sports players hoping to make it to the next level. The book also did a great job of showing how easy it is to get caught up in other people’s expectations of you. It had a lot of important lessons for young girls and athletes in general. I didn’t love the “forbidden” aspect of ump and player, but overall I devoured this book. Definitely recommend.

For a supposed “enemies-to-lovers” sports romance, there sure wasn’t much of the enemies part. The pacing was a little off for me, the enemies part lasted barely past the introduction and the romance was very fast-paced. There was a LOT of miscommunication which I struggled with, I get they’re in high school, but I hated that they both were kinda shitty to each other. There was also a lot of grief mentioned, both MC’s had family members die and that was handled well, even if the characters definitely should’ve been in therapy. The romance, when it wasn’t stressful because they were dumb, was nice. I liked the supporting characters the best though- Javonte and Mia were truly the voices of reason and I wish Ivy and June would’ve listened to them.

Overall not bad, but the amount of miscommunication really turned me off, so watch out.

This is another one of those rare unicorn queer YA books that actually feels like it was written for real-life queer youths. And, at the same time, it healed me from all the heterosexual nonsense I’ve had to endure over the years every time a fictional girl outshined all the boys on her sports team. (I am truly never going to be over Bend It Like Beckham’s supposed straightness!)

June is a baseball pitcher phenom with dreams of being the first woman to go pro. Or, well, they’re her dad’s dreams, really, the only hope he’s had since June’s mom died. Ivy is an aspiring professional referee/umpire; she wants to bust down the doors that other women have barely pushed through. Only, her mom wants her to fulfill her dead brother’s collegiate dreams instead. Seems like June and Ivy are a match made in an Iowan cornfield, right? Wrong! It’s totally against the rules for umpires to date players! If you’re looking for something to scratch your League of Their Own heartache/itch, this is it.

Thank you to Penguin Young Readers Group and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book and provide and honest review.

Talk about anxious attachment styles!

This one made me cringe so hard. Every character needs therapy to deal with their shit before they jump into such unhealthy relationships. It felt like a bad car accident--I couldn't stop reading it just because it was so bad and I wanted to see how bad it could get.

Over the storyline was super cute and I found the relationship between June and Ivy cute. There were moments though when I definitely wanted to grab Ivy and tell her that she is way too good to be with June. I did find June’s character to be slightly (okay….extremely) selfish and I had a hard time connecting with her because of it.

Being a former college athlete, I did have a hard time with the recruiting aspects that are mentioned in this book. It all seemed a little out there in the way that this book talks about it. However, that is also just me being slightly picky and hypercritical.

This was a quick read for me which I loved, and I never felt like I was forcing myself to finish this story as I have with other books.

I really enjoyed this book! I loved how we got to see June and Ivy's relationship and the way that they each struggled with their own problems. It was a really sweet book!

First off, thank you NetGalley and Penguin for this ARC!

I really enjoyed this book, even if I wish that the characters wouldn't have jumped as quickly into a relationship as they did. I wish we would have had a bit more development at that stage, but alas.

That being said, I loved the dynamic of the umpire/pitcher forbidden relationship, and both main characters were very loveable even if their lack of communication was something I wanted to whack them both for.

#PlayingforKeeps #NetGalley

I love sport romances, so it wasn’t hard not to love this book. The enemies to lovers was kinda quick but the book was only 230ish pages. The only thing missing was more of Ivy and her completing her goals.

DNF @ 22%

Setting: unspecified USA state
Rep: lesbian protagonist; bisexual protagonist

I think I may be falling out of love with YA, I'm just not feeling this after having read some great books recently and I can't tell the difference between June and Ivy, and I think I've grown out of teen miscommunication and immaturity. I've enjoyed some of Dugan's previous books but this one just isn't for me.

I kept hoping for better things from this book, but in the end I'm calling it quits at 57% in; the problems kept piling and piling up, with miscommunication being the final straw that broke the camel's back. At a point, I felt genuine dread when I thought about returning to this book, so I'll keep my critiques short with a bullet point list:

- Overly focuses on the minutiae of sports, glazing over character relationship development: Sure, we hear every detail about every inning and every strike/ball shot that Ivy calls but suddenly when it comes to Ivy and June's relationship it's "oh yeah also this is our 30th date and my parents have met her already". It barely gives readers a chance to enjoy their relationship, heavily weakening their on page chemistry.

- Cancer diagnoses as a catalyst for relationship forming is a lazy and fairly uncouth: the MC's never go to therapy to help understand the death of a major family member, and though I recognize that this can be due to a plethora of financial constraints, the way this impacts the characters felt built up for drama and interesting family dynamics. But it felt so overdone and boring.

- Poorly written miscommunication trope leads the relationship development: you know that the second the phrase "don't you trust me?" hits the page, the outcome is about to become the most convoluted drawn out miscommunication gaslighting disaster known to infect your brain. Not only does a character purposefully lie and deceive and gaslight her love interest, but in the following chapter she blames the other character for feeling like she needed to lie. "Does she even know me at all, she should've seen right through me" is a flimsy shoddy excuse. I've read miscommunication that is thoroughly fleshed out between both love interests and given ample nuance. This, however, was definitely not that. And I get that these characters are 18 year olds who are about to be in college. But this book isn't penned as a young adult romance, so why are we entertaining adolescent childish writing?

Overall this book is poorly written in all fronts: character development, plot development, and relationship development and I wouldn't recommend this book in the slightest, there are definitely much better sapphic romances on the market that are much more worth your time,

I thoroughly enjoyed this new novel from Jennifer Dugan. One of the primary things that I look for when I am reading a new book is how the characters are developed over time and whether I feel any emotion for them. This story did an excellent job of character development to the point that I thoroughly disliked a couple of the characters and loved the main characters.

I have seen so many kids go through what June did, where their parents try to mold them and shape them into star athletes without letting them grow up and enjoy their teen years. I experienced some of that growing up as well and the author did an excellent job of portraying the father and the aspirations he placed on his kid.

I loved the relationship building that was done between Ivy and June. They were bitter enemies at the start due to one being an athlete and the other being a player. But their attraction was magnetic. When they kissed in the book, I could feel the love as I read it. I found myself hoping for them to work through their trials and come out on the other side.

I enjoyed that this was a sweet romance and was very well written.

Fairly predictable rom com but it was still a good read that I enjoyed. Because it's YA I probably won't reread it but I will recommend it to teens.

Oh my gosh this was so cute! I really liked this book and I now really really want to get to Dugan's backlist. I think this a great novel that could even exist in all classrooms. It was so cute and I will definitely put the novel on my shelves for my students.

Thank you to NetGalley, PENGUIN GROUP Penguin, and G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers for allowing me access to the E-arc.

CW Death of a parent and sibling. Both are due to cancer that happens off the page.

This was a beautiful story! It’s more emotional than I thought this story was going to be!

June is a dedicated pitcher who lost her mom. Both of her parents are baseball and softball players. She wants nothing more than to make her mom proud so she can read the letters that her mom wrote for specific accomplishments. Her dad has pushed really hard to push her to her limits. She tries so hard to not let the pain in her shoulder affect her playing.

Ivy wants to be a referee for different sports games. Her mother is pushing her so hard to apply to colleges because she doesn’t understand why she would want to do that as a career. Her mother has been pushing even harder after her son and Ivy’s brother passed away. Ivy just wants to do what she loves. She doesn’t want to have a career like her brother wanted.

They find themselves in a rivals-to-lovers situation. I love the fact that June is a lesbian and Ivy is bi. The queer reps in this story are a bonus.

I highly recommend it!!!

First things first, I think this is a book about grief more than a romance. There's no mention of that in the description, but both girls have lost close family members (a brother and a mother, respectively) to cancer, and that's a HUGE part of the book. It shapes every major decision both girls make, it leaves both girls with incredibly strained family dynamics, and it is a very core part of the book.

Ivy wants to be a professional referee. June wants to be a professional baseball player. When Ivy is asked to spend the season as an umpire, she agrees, even though she hates baseball: it pays better than reffing the soccer games, and it'll look good on her resume. Ivy and June immediately butt heads on the field, but off the field they find common ground in the fact that they've both lost close family members to cancer and they're both queer.

I want to start by saying that I loved the grief aspect of this book, and for the most part I really liked the sports aspect, as well. Both girls are dealing with parents whose grief clashes with their own, and both feel the crushing weight of expectations put on them as a result. I also thought that the girls acted their age--they were sometimes a bit immature, and they didn't always communicate that well, but they're stressed out high school seniors dealing with a lot, so I did appreciate that aspect.

There were a lot of things I struggled with with this book, and I waffled between 3 and 2 stars. My biggest issue was that a LOT of important things happened off the page: most of Ivy and June's early relationship (spoilers, but they have a first date and then one of them says in the narration that three more dates happen. That's it. We get no more info about those three dates); the resolution with the letters (which is a huge focus of June's POV); and a lot of other huge moments happen off the page, which really lessened their impact. I honestly wasn't particularly invested in the romance because we didn't really see much of the early days; them falling for each other was mostly off-page, and then we jumped straight into on-page tension and I didn't feel like I had enough of a foundation there to really root for them to be together.

I also had a hard time remembering who was who--there wasn't really a different between June's and Ivy's voices, and with it being in 1st person there weren't always a lot of name-usage, so I sometimes got confused about whose POV I was in.

Overall I liked the premise, and I did love a lot of what actually happened on the page, but I think this book would have needed to be like 50-100 pages longer for me to love it. It just didn't quite feel complete without a lot of those big scenes that happened off-page.

Huge TW for death of a brother and death of a mother to cancer, and resulting strained family dynamics. These permeate the book--it's a huge enough element of the book that I am BAFFLED they didn't make it into the description of the book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of Playing for Keeps!

3.75 ★

Playing for Keeps follows two ambitious and strong-willed MCs, Ivy & June, who are on paths to their own dreams that inevitably cross. Ivy is focused on becoming one of the few female umpires to officiate the major leagues & June is the star pitcher of her varsity baseball team, on track to become the first woman to play in the MLB. When Ivy officiates one of June’s games, tensions rise and love begins to blossom.

Dugan is a talented author with a plethora of YA and one adult novel under her belt; Playing for Keeps is the first time I’ve read her work and I am interested in exploring the rest of her catalogue.

With the characters being in high school and this book being YA, I had a bit of a difficult time dealing with their immaturity and commitment to miscommunication. I did have to keep reminding myself that they are kids and would eventually figure it out. The story is still enjoyable and I liked seeing their storylines play out; although I wish there was more of an enemies-to-lovers arc that Playing for Keeps appeared to start heading towards near the beginning of the novel.

A free copy of Playing for Keeps was received in exchange for my honest review.

Since the passing of a member of their family, June and Ivy have both thrown themselves into various activities hoping to survive their senior year and make it the next step where there will hopefully be more room to breath. For June, that means buckling down on pitching for her elite club team with her father overseeing her every move. The field seems to be the only place where the two of them can connect and she knows her deceased mother had hopes of her making it to the pros. For Ivy, it means convincing her mother that she is serious about reff-ing at the professional level and not following the dreams of her deceased brother into college and the medical field. When the two first cross on the field, Ivy behind the plate and June on the mound, sparks fly, but not in romantic way as a wild(?) pitch by June flies a little too close to Ivy's head after she's accused of making a bad call. But when Ivy finds June squatting in the umpires locker room having a vulnerable moment, the walls start to come down and the two find they have more in common then they'd have ever thought possible. Does their budding romance stand a chance in the face of family pressure and goals?

This was a very cute YA Sapphic romance with female characters standing strong in traditionally male sports spaces. It's really what Jennifer Dugan does best. Ivy and June are both empathetic characters readers will root for as both individuals and a couple. I loved the exploration of umpiring as a non-traditional career choice and the information provided about discrepancies in women's representation in the field and more generally in certain areas of sports. Ivy's best friend Mia is am amazing secondary character providing some much needed BFF vibes, common sense advice, and support. Something this novel does quite well is build a whirlwind romance the main characters become swept up in to the point of ridiculousness and Mia comes in with some sage words on balance and a reminder that no romance is worth losing yourself in. It's a little obvious, but a good reminder for readers of all ages.

I loved the idea of this book - an umpire and a hot-headed player falling for each other is such a fun romance idea. But this felt less like a full book and more like something somewhere between an outline and a first draft. I did not care at all if Ivy and June stayed together, and in fact I felt that they shouldn't be together. Not only did their only real bond seemed to be based on tragedy/trauma, but their relationship wasn't developed at all.

This is the second Dugan book in a row that has been a huge disappointment to me. I loved Melt With You and Coven, but this and Last Girl Standing both were pretty bad. I think she and the publisher need to have her take more time on her books, instead of rushing out a YA, graphic novel, and adult romance per year.