Playing the Part (A Class of Their Own #3) by Jen Turano

Title: Playing the Part (A Class of Their Own #3)

Author: Jen Turano

Pages: 352

Release Date: March 1, 2016

Genre: Historical Romantic Comedy

Publisher: Bethany House

Format: Paperback (also available in eBook)

Note: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

About the book:

     Lucetta Plum is an actress on the rise in New York City, but is forced to abandon her starring role when a fan’s interest turns threatening. Lucetta’s widowed friend, Abigail Hart, is delighted at the opportunity to meddle in Lucetta’s life and promptly whisks her away to her grandson’s estate to hide out.

     Bram Haverstein may appear to simply be a somewhat eccentric gentleman of means, but a mysterious career and a secret fascination with a certain actress mean there’s much more to him than society knows.

     Lucetta, who has no interest in Abigail’s matchmaking machinations, has the best intentions of remaining cordial but coolly distant to Bram. But when she can’t ignore the strange and mysterious things going on in his house, it’ll take more than good intentions to keep her from trying to discover who Bram is behind the part he plays.

My review:

     Another hilarious historical romantic comedy!

     This story doesn’t exactly pick up where the other two books in this series left off. In that sense it isn’t a “true” series. But the main characters from each of the previous books put in an appearance and reference is made to how they met. In my mind this means that reading the books in order enhances the enjoyment of reading this final story.

     The characters that Jen creates for this book live up to my expectations from reading all of her previous books. The quirks that she comes up with for each of them never fail to amuse me. Lucetta Plum and Bram Haverstein are some of the funniest people that I’ve ever had the chance to meet in the pages of a book.

     Lucetta hates the idea of damsels in distress, but she finds herself thrust into that role. I love how she managed to express her displeasure in it and tries to get out of situations by herself. The twists in the story explaining what put her in danger and connecting all the different people by the end of the story were very entertaining.

     Added to all of these, light-hearted shenanigans there are some deeper looks at how strained family relationships can develop. Then steps needed to restore them are explored. This resulted in a nice challenge to take a look at our own relationships.

     As with both of the previous books in this series I have to highly recommend this one. It gets a rating of 5 stars from me. If you want something to make you laugh you will not regret picking up this delightful book.