Making a Play

About Making a Play

Making a Play is the fifth novel in Abbi Glines' Field Party series, published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. The series, which follows the intertwined lives of a group of teenagers in the fictional town of Lawton, Alabama, had by its fifth installment established a consistent readership and critical reputation as one of the more popular contemporary Southern-set YA romance series. Each volume centers on a different couple from within the extended Lawton cast while maintaining the larger community and its ongoing dynamics.

Like its predecessors, Making a Play is set against the backdrop of Lawton's football culture — the field parties after Friday night games that give the series its name, the social hierarchies of a small town where athletic success is a form of status, and the particular complications of teenage life lived under community scrutiny. The series has consistently explored how the people who appear most successful in Lawton's social world are often carrying the heaviest private burdens, and the fifth novel continues in that tradition.

The novel introduces a new primary couple from within the existing friend group, developing characters who have appeared in supporting roles across earlier volumes into the leads of their own story. Glines' approach to the series — building the world cumulatively, giving each book to characters already known to regular readers — creates continuity without sacrificing accessibility for new readers coming to the series at any point.

The Field Party Series at Five Volumes

By 2021, the Field Party series had become one of the signature long-running YA romance series of its era, earning the #1 New York Times bestseller designation that distinguishes Glines' work across multiple series. The series' sustained readership is a product of its community-building: readers return to Lawton because they want to know what happens next to the people they've already come to know, not just to the new central couple.

Why It Has Been Challenged

Making a Play has been challenged in school libraries as part of ongoing challenges to the Field Party series as a whole, primarily for sexual content and mature themes. The novel has been removed or restricted from school library collections in districts that have targeted the series either for individual volume challenges or as part of broader sweeps of YA romance titles.