Looking For Group by Alexis Hall

Drew is the right kind of gamer. Sure, he’s a nerd, but he also has friends, plays sports, and is semi-popular.

One day, while playing with a new raid group on his favourite MMO, he meets a female elf called Solace, whom he all of a sudden finds himself falling for, even though he’s past crushing on fictional pixel characters. Then Drew finds out, though he isn’t too shocked, that Solace is actually another boy called Kit.

Kit is not like Drew. He doesn’t have a large real-world friendship group; he doesn’t play sports, and gaming is his whole life. His true friends are those he plays with online.

Although at first saddened by Solace’s real identity, Drew quickly comes to realise he doesn’t care that Kit is a boy. There’s something there, and he wants to explore it. But, being so different, can they make it work when not behind a computer screen?

Looking for Group was a hard book for me to rate, as I’m not a gamer, and I feel that background gaming knowledge is needed to completely adore this world. The narrative relies heavily upon the gaming world, including slang and game models, which can be hard to follow. At times, I found my eyes skimming the page, just waiting for interaction between our love interests. There was so much slang that I kind of gave up googling half of it, and just guessed.

Although the relationship between Drew and Kit is a cute one, one that made me smile multiple times, it admittedly felt a little underdeveloped. They went from strangers, to dating, to boyfriend in the space of just a couple of chapters. Although the scenes they share together are nice, there was really no depth to their relationship at all. They are just two hot boys who happened to like each other.

I think a large part of this lack of connection is the vast amount of characters piled into what is a rather short book. The raid group consists of around seven people, all of them always there when raiding, and then Drew has around four friends he regularly hangs out with. It’s kind of hard to get to know the main characters together when they are constantly surrounded by those who take up more of the scene.

Another part I wasn’t too sure on was the reasons for Drew being hurt that Kit wanted to go home to play HoL with his online friends. At this point in the book, they’d spent nearly twenty-four hours together with Drew’s friends. It was such a non-issue. Although I do understand that Drew has had bad experiences with online buddies, it just threw me off that he’d think that you couldn’t have real friends online when that’s literally where he met his boyfriend.

A key element I do like about the main relationship, though, is that any conflict does not come from the fact that this is a gay relationship. Drew has a mini freak out, checks himself, and then allows himself to feel. So often in these stories, too much drama revolves around coming out, leaving little time for the romance to actually flourish.