Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
So this is honestly a weird one. I can’t give it 5 stars cause there’s a messy twist that actually just messed up the entire book for me towards the 80 percent mark (via my e-reader) and I had to go back and re-read some perspectives and it just frustrated me a bit because I was still confused and then I had to re-read parts of this book three times. I wanted a fun romance and not homework. So I settled on three stars and just decided to shake my head a bit and let it go because there are plot holes I wasn’t looking at too closely, but when you are re-reading something three times in a row you realize that hey that doesn’t make sense.
The Name Game follows two people named Charlie Jones who apply for a job as a caretaker manager on the Isle of Ormer. Charlie (female) is glad to be away and all we know is that they experienced a tragedy and they were ready to move onto something else. Charlie (male) is a recovering alcoholic and needs a fresh start. When they both show up to start work, the owners decide to keep them both on for a few months with them pushing the decision on the permanent hire at that point. We deal with male Charlie feeling suspicious of female Charlie, and then female Charlie doing what she can to befriend and ignore the feelings she is starting to have for male Charlie. Yeah that’s confusing isn’t it? It doesn’t help that then the book changes perspectives, fonts, and timelines following Charlie and Charlie and another perspective (no spoilers).
Honestly this was just too confusing. At first I was like cool, enemies to lovers give it to me. The two Charlies do have chemistry, but the overall plot about the job and some of the incidents on the Isle with the people living there just got boring after a while. I was more invested in their past before coming to the Isle and wanted to know more about that. And the jumping back and forth in timelines just started to be aggravating after a while. It didn’t help that there was a whole I want a baby storyline that just read as desperate and messy and I just was like no thank you.
The Isle was going for kooky kindred spirits and I just said whatever. I don’t know. O’Leary can usually make her secondary characters come alive and they just did not in this one. I got tired of the character of Galoshes whose first name we found out in the last pages of the book. I guess I was supposed to care.
The ending just wrapped things up too simply. There’s the twist that I noted other readers have been saying the same thing, it was too confusing and it made zero sense and it honestly had me dislike characters we got to know. I have zero idea why O’Leary decided let’s make the readers hate everyone and be confused, but she did. The story does end on a HEA, but I just feel kind of blah about it. I do not dislike this one as much as The No-Show, but she did the same thing here that she did in that one. Played with timelines/perspectives to give you a twist you didn’t ask for even a little. I just want a nice romance next time.
