Looking for Group

Starred review from July 4, 2016
In this utterly charming romance between two 19-year-old university students, Hall’s (For Real) convincing worldbuilding invites the reader into an immersive gaming experience (glossary included for the uninitiated). Drew and Kit’s avatars, Orcarella and Solace, meet in a multiplayer online game, Heroes of Legend. In virtual conversations, which allow simultaneous group chat and private asides, Hall captures the sparks, miscommunications, and wide-ranging emotions between the two as they develop a genuine mutual attraction in a simulated realm. For example, when Drew realizes that the feminine Solace’s creator is male: “ whispers: Um, are you okay?.../ To : not really no/ whispers: um... you thought I was a girl, didn’t you?..../ To : don’t want to talk about this.” Accepting that he likes a boy comes easier to Drew than facing the challenges of negotiating their relationship in parallel worlds. Complicated questions include whether they spend time together in person or online, and who they spend time with: Drew’s fellow university students or Kit’s guildmates, whom he knows only through online interactions but considers his closest friends. Hall’s intriguing combination of philosophical contemplation, gaming, and awkward-sweet seduction produces a compelling love story with numerous laugh-out-loud moments and a final act that will thrill any connoisseur of romantic heroes’ groveling apologies. Agent: Courtney Miller-Callihan, Handspun Literary.

June 15, 2016
A young gamer meets the girl of his dreams in a massively multiplayer online game and is surprisingly OK with the discovery that the hot dark elf is a guy IRL.Drew lives in two different worlds: The Real World, where he's studying to be a game designer; and "Heroes of Legend," where he and his avatar, Orcarella, have just joined a new gaming guild. He's got friends in the real world, but he'd rather hang out with the Guild--particularly Solace, a beautiful healer he finds himself going on separate quests with and having plenty of late-night chats with, too. But now he's in a crisis. Turns out Solace, his dream girl, isn't actually a girl. Does Drew like guys? Or just this one? Or even this one? When he finally meets Kit in person, Drew is surprised by how OK he is with the fact that he's a man. The spark they discovered in "Heroes of Legend" is still there, and they're both willing to pursue it. As they fall deeper into a relationship that alternates between making out and playing video games, an intervention by Drew's IRL friends makes him wonder if he's too attached, both to Kit and the game. What starts out as a dense, vaguely tedious online gaming transcript evolves into a deeply real consideration of the ways people choose to pursue their passions and live their lives and people's perceptions of those ways. The first chapter has the potential to lose marginally interested nongamers, but holding on drops the reader into the mind of Drew, who is at times incredibly well-adjusted and at others completely hopeless--in other words, a pretty authentic college student.Hall (Waiting for the Flood, 2015, etc.) takes 10,000 geeky inside jokes and weaves them together with the challenges facing young people, whether they're nerdy or not, including game/life balance, understanding different kinds of friendship, and all the stops and starts of coming into yourself.

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