Thomas Keneally

Keneally's magnificent story of a young officer in a penal colony during the founding days of Australia transports readers through layer after layer of life in Sydney Cove, Australia. Advertising in New York Review of Books and Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Playmaker

In 1789 in Sydney Cove, the remotest penal colony of the British Empire, a group of convicts and one of their captors unite to stage a play. As felons, perjurers and whores rehearse, their playmaker becomes strangely seduced. For the play's power is mirrored in the rich, varied life of this primitive land, and, not least, in the convict and actress, Mary Brenham.

The Playmaker

 Bruna Acioly Leão

I soo wanted to like this book more. I mean honestly, I read female romance (well not the exact words) on the synopsis and just figured I had to read it.
Unfortunately, this book didn’t have much else to offer besides that.

The story follows Meg, who is a player at what I’m guessing is an amateur rugby team (I don’t really *get* sports so I don’t know) but also wants to be a kindergarten teacher. She has a great boyfriend and her life seems all put together, until her sexy, unattainable team mate Jacqueline kisses her.

So Meg starts to realize that maybe the plan she set out for herself isn’t really what she wants to do with the rest of her life and she is not really happy with these decisions, even though they are the easy logical way to go.

So far so good, right? Changing perspectives, opening up your mind to the world, getting to know yourself and what you really want out of life…Those are some great themes! But the execution of this book just fell flat for me.

First of all; the characters: I couldn’t really feel like they were real - I just didn’t really care about any of them. Meg is super indecisive - and even though she already knows she doesn’t really love her boyfriend Frasier she stays with him - and she is super mean to him sometimes too. The boyfriend is a complete push over and just sucks up everything that Meg says to him. He didn’t seem to have any kind of personality what so ever. And Jacqueline was just there - this magical lesbian representation of everything Meg wants but “can’t” have. I pretty much couldn’t see any of them as real people rather that character types, which is so not the way a story like that should have gone.

Another thing was the writing style. Everything is told to you. And there is this bunch of info dumping about Meg’s life previously to this, or her constantly thinking that she doesn’t really want to do what she is doing, but doing it anyway…It just got really annoying, really fast.

Which is all too bad, because the romance was actually really sweet and I really liked the discussion the characters have about taking risks on things in order to find happiness and also on the topic of bisexuality, which is something that doesn’t get discussed a lot, not even on the LGBTQ community or on books with LGBTQ characters.

I think if the book would have been slightly longer and had some editing out in some of the character background informations and some of Meg’s inner monologue, it could have been a lot better. I did enjoy it a lot more after the first half, which is when the romance actually happens.

Overall, I’m glad I read this book, despite its faults, and I could recommend it to people looking for a quick romance and a LGBTQ read.

Playmaker

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