Spotlight & Giveaway: Play For Me by Libby Hubscher

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Libby Hubscher to HJ!

Hi Libby and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Play For Me!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

When I came up with the idea, I was thinking the show New Girl meets Evvie Drake Starts Over. Basically, a Boston Red Sox athletic trainer loses her job and winds up at an arts-focused boarding school in New England where she has to room with three guys, including the orchestra teacher who can’t stand her. Sophie plans to win him over, and wins his heart instead.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

I have a couple, but they’re a bit spoilery. One of my favorite exchanges happens early on:
“What can I say, Doyle? You seem to bring out my baser tendencies.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, dropping a healthy portion of stuffing on my plate.
He leaned over. When he spoke, his voice was low and gruff in my ear. “You drive me absolutely mad.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• It’s very New Englandy, and parts of The Monadnock School’s campus were inspired by my high school – Tilton School – in New Hampshire, where I was a day student from my sophmore through senior year.
• Jonas has a British accent – you’re welcome.
• There’s a prom.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Sophie and Jonas are thrown together in a faculty apartment and it seems like a case of distaste at first sight. But there’s no denying that there is some intense tension there from the start. For Sophie, she loves a challenge, and broody Jonas is a Challenge. To Jonas, she’s like a force of nature.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I definitely laughed several times while writing. Jonas loves to mess with Sophie and he’s constantly calling her mildy insulting pet names, like Sporty Spice and honorary leprechaun. There’s one scene involving a shared hotel room where Sophie devours a whole tray of chocolate-covered strawberries to avoid her feelings of attraction to Jonas that cracked me up every time I read it.

Readers should read this book….

I wanted this book to be really hopeful and fun. While both Sophie and Jonas have some hard things they’re dealing with, they also face every fun situation and trope that I love in a romance – forced proximity, banter in the form of bickering, accidental shower run-ins, falling in the snow, only one bed – all while falling in love and working through their struggles together.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on my fourth book – which is about a treasure hunter on an Icelandic expedition, who meets a novelist struggling with writer’s block. They have an intense romantic encounter before he ruins it all by leaving her without warning. After his barely fictionalized version of their time together becomes a bestseller, he tracks her down on a new treasure hunt in the Caribbean hoping for more inspiration and a second chance. It is planned to come out in December 2024.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 1 Physical copy of Play For Me by Libby Hubscher

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Sophie and Jonas go from roommates that don’t get along to lovers while sharing a faculty apartment on the campus where they both work. If you were ever in a similar situation, would you get involved with a roommate or not, and why?

 
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Excerpt from Play For Me:

I lost everything I loved in the span of twenty-four hours. Well, nearly everything, since Dad was still safely tucked away in Sommerset Meadows, but that’s a different story.
Heartbreak comes in all forms. For me, baseball went first.
My home in Boston and cannoli from Vitales in the North End quickly followed.
I was eating my feelings in the form of a chocolate chip cannoli when a man holding a sheet cake paused to look me over, and upon recognizing me, he promptly spit in my face. He was wearing an autographed Big Papi jersey and an ex- pression that can only be described as murderous. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned . . . well, a woman scorned has nothing on a Red Sox fan who just stumbled upon the trainer responsible for ruining the team’s World Series run stuffing her face with pastry.
“That’s for benching Iwasaki!” he hollered. “You cost us the series!”
The rabid fan couldn’t have known that only two hours

earlier I’d been forced to resign in front of a room full of middle-aged men in ill-fitting polo shirts. He wouldn’t have seen me sitting on the T next to a cardboard box full of my things, willing myself not to cry. And he definitely had no earthly notion that I’d arrived home to find the rest of my worldly possessions packed away in a matching luggage set my boyfriend, Patrick, had originally bought for me to use on our trip to Zurich in January. As the team doctor, he hadn’t taken kindly to me calling his medical judgment into question. He’d carved me out of our shared brownstone and his life with speed and surgical precision.
I didn’t fault any of them for being angry, even this guy. I was a Red Sox fan, after all, one who grew up watching every home game while my dad worked as a custodian in Fenway; the agony of defeat had rocked me to my core more than once. But I wasn’t at my best, and my cheek was damp with spittle, which is probably why I exploded out of my chair, knocked the cake box out of the man’s hand, and smashed my half-eaten cannoli into his face.
“I’d do it again!” I yelled. Cake splattered on the floor around us. It was completely out of character—the aggression, I mean, not the thing that had brought me to that moment; still, I meant what I said. At only twenty-two, Iwasaki was already the kind of pitcher that comes along once every hun- dred years. He’d had an ulnar collateral ligament sprain that the medical team had been treating with stem cells and plasma injections, but his body wasn’t ready. I could see it in his face, the way he grimaced and guarded his arm when no one else was looking. Just hours before the game, he’d been drenched with sweat after throwing a couple of easy pitches.
“How bad is it?” I’d asked him.

He’d shaken his head. “Not bad,” he’d said. “Just nerves.” As if the league’s best pitcher had ever been that nervous a day in his life. I gave him a look. “I’m good,” he lied.
What ensued was a series of fights with what felt like ev- eryone in the organization from Patrick to the GM, but in the end Iwasaki went back on the injured list, and I went on a list too—one that started with “black” and ended with “balled.”

Excerpted from PLAY FOR ME by Libby Hubscher, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

When her new job takes her to a New England boarding school, she’s surprised to find her roommates are all men – including a very handsome one who plays by his own rules.

Sophie Doyle has her dream job as the head athletic trainer for her favorite baseball team (go Red Sox!), a handsome boyfriend, and easy access to the finest cannoli in Boston. When she loses all three and the World Series to boot, she’s forced to apply for the open trainer position at an arts-focused boarding school in New Hampshire. The only available room is a glorified closet in an apartment with three guys: Jonas Voss, the aloof and attractive orchestra teacher, and his two rambunctious roommates.

Sophie knows that training a bunch of privileged high school kids whose idea of a play is A Chorus Line instead of a walk-off homer is going to be a big change from the pro athletes she’s used to. She wasn’t expecting that these students would have big-time talent and even bigger-time problems. Sophie has troubles of her own—Jonas is a full-fledged grump who clearly doesn’t want her near him or the precious piano he never plays.
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Meet the Author:

Libby Hubscher is an author and scientist. She studied biology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and holds a doctor of philosophy in molecular toxicology from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared online and in textbooks, scientific journals, and literary journals. Her short story “The Unwelcome Guest” was long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2018. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, two young children, and a menagerie of pets.
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