The Silver Shadow

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.

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.