Conventionally Yours

My first gay romance!

Very cute, still a little cheesy at parts and I don't know how “real” it is, but I enjoyed it. Man, I am so single and it hurts how much I want a road trip with a cute boy to have adventures with.

This is a fairly cute read and I enjoyed the pictures that were included in the book. The pacing is decent and I never felt like it was dragging on. The Gamer Grandpa was a good setup. That being said, this book suffered from a few issues. 1. Everything just feels...too convenient. That's not me knocking on how romance novels work in general. 2. Since the shop owners they were stopping to visit were at least somewhat known quantities, the percentage of them being jerks felt higher than it should have been.
For you if:
If you enjoy romance and d0n't mind mid-range sexual content. It never felt X-rated to me.
Like roadtrip stories
Enjoy characters being immersed in nerd world/ courting through card games.
Found family/ family supporting each other
Youtubers/ influencers
Queer representation
Not for you:
If you dislike melodrama
If you want everything to be realistic
If homophobia being in the book somewhere is a problem for you.
If you are anxious about paying for college/ what to do after college and don't want more anxiety in your reading.

so cute:))

I love the premise of this book! It has so many of my favorite tropes: enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, forced proximity, but there's only one bed oh no what do we do, all that good stuff. And it's about nerdy stuff like conventions and gaming and while I'm not into that particular realm of Nerdom, I can still appreciate it. With all of those factors, it seems like an easy sell, but I really wasn't a fan of this at all.

I think my big issue was the first-person dual perspectives. Conrad and Alden's inner voices sounded pretty darn identical to me, including both of them using the word “darn” somewhat frequently. If it had been limited to one perspective, or was told in third-person, maybe it would have worked better for me.

Also, they never really seemed like enemies or rivals? More like they were part of the same friendship circle and just sort of...were mildly annoyed by the other sometimes? I don't know. The writing was very tell-not-show. I have no doubt that others will appreciate it more than I did. I will give it this: it's extremely readable and addictive.

Anyway, 2 darn stars out of 5.

I love character driven plots so much. Falling in love with the characters is always my favorite part of reading. Also love the enemies to lovers thing, road trips, and finding yourself.

This was really sweet, but it did have a tendency to drag in the middle. So while I always enjoyed it while I was reading it, I didn't always feel the urge to pick it up again.

It's hard to really argue with a cute, light, nerdy romance, so in that respect I enjoyed this book because it's all of those things. Unfortunately, it was hard for me to really get invested. (Honestly, if I hadn't been pressured by the fact that it was a library rental, I might have put off finishing it for quite some time.)

For me, there was a huge lack of urgency in the primary conflict. The fact that neither of them seemed to have any other idea of how they could fix their problems except this tournament win seemed odd, especially for Alden. (It didn't help that he eventually seemed to realize that himself which made it all feel even more pointless.) And then when it finally came to a head, the resolution was... oddly floppy. While I liked that they communicated and didn't make a massively stupid misunderstanding of the whole thing, it felt super anticlimactic.

I also did not feel particularly invested in either of the MCs. They both did an enormous amount of inner monologuing and, despite their supposed completely oppositional personalities, both of them were written in very similar voices. Half the time I wasn't sure whose chapter it was and had to wait until one of the characters said a name to figure it out. (And then a few paragraphs later I would have already forgotten again.) Having two first person POVs is becoming a lot more common, and I think people are forgetting what a risk it can be if your POV voices aren't super distinct. In this book, it served to make the whole thing fall a little flat for me. Payton was the only character who felt more dimensional, and they were only in it for a couple chapters. (Maybe that's why.)

Overall, it was a very cute story and I really loved the TCG aspect of it (Odyssey did sound super cool and was surprisingly well fleshed out), but without the depth of character and motivations to drive me, I can't say it'll be going on my favorites shelf.

Annabeth Albert's first book for Sourcebooks is a strong return to form. I loved her early Gaymers series ([b:Status Update 26162169 Status Update (#gaymers, #1) Annabeth Albert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1444257447l/26162169.SY75.jpg 46121871], [b:Connection Error 28807263 Connection Error (#gaymers, #3) Annabeth Albert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1465442518l/28807263.SY75.jpg 49020831], etc.) but I wasn't as enamored of her Navy SEAL Out of Uniform series and she lost me entirely with [b:Arctic Sun 42354665 Arctic Sun (Frozen Hearts, #1) Annabeth Albert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1549648632l/42354665.SY75.jpg 66003456]. I'm relieved to find that Conventionally Yours takes her back to the New Adults MCs that made Gaymers so much fun, and she employs some of my favorite tropes (road trip, opposites attract, enemies-to-lovers) with great success.The plot is predictable, but like any good road trip the fun is in the journey, not the destination. As Conrad and Alden slowly make their way from New Jersey to Las Vegas for a national gaming convention, including a tournament they both desperately want to win, they slowly start to see each other as real people instead of annoying opponents, and they open up to each other about their respective challenges. Alden is serious, socially awkward and rule-bound but also extremely caring in his own way. His ability to relate to kids (he likes them because they're honest about their feelings and needs) made me melt. I also appreciated the Jewish rep and the fact that while Alden's moms keep trying to find a diagnosis that will accurately describe (and then “cure” him), he's basically some level of “neuro-diverse” and in the end the exact label doesn't matter; he is who he is.Conrad is the handsome happy-go-lucky party boy who is hiding tremendous pain and stress, and when the truth about why he needs to win comes out I wanted to punch the people who had hurt him. The MCs' relationship is slow to develop and the middle of the book lags a bit, but without the middle we wouldn't have the opportunity to experience the wonders of the trip along with the boys, including my hometown St. Louis' famous arch , a well-deserved diss against St. Louis' horrific square pizza, and a nod to Columbia MO's much more palatable Shakespeare's Pizza. I'm not a game player, but I assume that fictional Odyssey game that the MCs play is similar to the Magic card decks that my kids once had, and Albert describes the game play sufficiently that I could follow the gist of the action, if not the specifics. She cleverly lets the lessons and experiences from the trip inform their game strategy. And who would have thought that a climactic scene of two people playing cards would be so exciting and suspenseful?For those who have followed Albert here from her Carina books, I should warn you that the sex scenes are much less explicit and much more vanilla than the Out of Uniform series. That didn't bother me, but if you're here for lots of sexytimes you might be disappointed. Also there is quite a bit of space devoted to Alden and Conrad stuck in their own heads thinking and overthinking their reactions to each other, in a way that I suspect few 25 year old young men actually do, but that's pretty standard for this genre.Conventionally Yours is listed as the first book in the True Colors series. There are several secondary characters who could serve as MCs for future installments, although I can't say that any of them stood out as distinct enough to deserve their own stories. But I'd be willing to check them out and I'm happy to see more of the Annabeth Albert that made me become such a fan in the first place.ARC received from Net Galley in exchange for honest review.