A couple of weeks ago, I was on my way to see Cat Sebastian.
(Okay, I was heading to Unbound Book Festival to speak on a panel, but a great deal of my excitement was the ability to spend a little bit of time with Cat, who I had met before, and who I know to be a delightful person. Also, she was one of two people I would know at this thing, and I intended to latch on in the most awkward way possible.)
With hours of travel ahead of me, I thought it would be the perfect time to start reading the eARC I had downloaded ages before of her upcoming release, You Should Be So Lucky. As a companion to We Could Be So Good, I knew it would offer me the same squishy feeling that the previous book had, and hoped it would live up to the gloriousness of the previous book. Needless to say, I hardly noticed the bumps on the flight up to St. Louis and read whenever I got the chance to while I was there (there wasn’t very much downtime, but I found it). When I finished it before my connecting flight took off from Dallas, I scrolled through a few pages of my kindle before making the sound decision to play a jewel sliding game on my phone for the next two hours, because no way was I going to be able to enjoy anything else I picked up.
Needless to say, it lived up.
As I mentioned, You Should Be So Lucky is a companion to We Could Be So Good, but you don’t particularly have to have read it in order to enjoy the latter. You should absolutely read it, no mistake. But you don’t have to. I won’t hold it against you. YSBSL takes place a couple of years after WCBSG ends, in 1960. Mark, who we meet in WCBSG, is a book reviewer and arts journalist for The Chronicle, but he hasn’t particularly been doing any work. He’s called in, though, to do some sports writing—something he’s never done and never expected to do. Tasked with following around the newest member of the New York Not The Mets Robins to ghostwrite journal articles for the paper, he doesn’t expect to take a liking to Eddie. Eddie said some misguided things when he discovered he got traded to the Not The Mets Robins, and now nobody on the team will talk to him. He will do anything to have someone say nice words to him, even if it means hanging out with a reporter. Especially a reporter he likes looking at. As he and Mark get to know each other better, they can’t help their attraction, but as I mentioned it is 1960, and even if Mark doesn’t particularly hide his sexuality or expression of such, Eddie is in the public eye, a professional athlete. The story takes some interesting directions with the way this causes conflict, but it’s also an incredibly quiet book that doesn’t spark too much anxiety about that kind of thing for the reader.
There are so many things to love about this book. It’s quiet, but engaging. The writing is spectacular, as should be expected with something Cat has written. The relationship is subtle, but lived in. It feels like a romance that might have happened in the time during which it was written—sure, there might be some anxiety about the significant consequences of being outed in that time period, but it can’t keep you from living a life. There are plenty of other things that can do that in this book, including the grief of having lost a partner, the fear of losing your livelihood, and the absolute loneliness that comes with both of those things. But we get to watch Mark and Eddie move through those things, and come through the other side with each other. It’s just…beautiful.
A week later, I got a notification from Libby: my hold for Lucky Bounce by Cait Nary, which I had already had it Deliver Later several times, had come in again. I already had a book out, but figured—why not. I would probably get to it by the time it was time to return it. Maybe.
That Saturday, I would start reading the other book I had out from Libby while my spouse watched disc golf, which is definitely not interesting enough to keep my full attention. The other book…wasn’t good…and about five pages in I switched over to Lucky Bounce with hope in my heart.
Reader, I Devoured It.
I continued reading it until it was time to break for dinner, and in the morning (when it was time for more disc golf) I picked up where I’d started and kept going even when hubs left (to play disc golf, obviously), oblivious to the rest of the world. This is particularly impressive because I had been spending any waking moment alone trying to slam through Outlander, which I had started watching when I got back from a trip to England and Scotland right before Unbound. Jamie Fraser? Didn’t think a thing about him while Zeke and Spencer were in my face.
Similarly to You Should Be So Lucky, Lucky Bounce is a quiet book with relatively little in the form of “plot.” As in, there isn’t a thing that’s happening outside of the people involved living their lives, falling in love, and living some more. Zeke is a PE teacher at a Philadelphia Friends school’s Lower School (which, for those unfamiliar, is usually Kindergarten through eighth grade). It’s a schmancy school, as many East Coast Friends schools are known to be, so he’s used to famous people’s kids being in his classes. But when his favorite hockey player walks into Back to School Night with a kid nobody knows about, Zeke just about loses his mind. He keeps his cool, but when Spencer reaches out about something, and then keeps reaching out, Zeke has no idea what to do. We watch the evolution of an acquaintanceship to a friendship to a courtship, and it’s precious and sweet. Sure, the whole “Zeke Is Spencer’s Kid’s Teacher” thing doesn’t particularly come up in any kind of significant way, but do we care? I don’t think we do. All in all, it’s one giant hug of a book, and reading it in two sittings is the least I could do to show my love. I’ve heard that Cait Nary’s other books don’t have quite the same fluffy vibe, but I intend to check them out anyway (already had, but now they’ve jumped up my list).
It’s a complete coincidence that I came to read and love two books with “Lucky” in the title within weeks of each other, but it’s no coincidence that the things they have in common contribute to what made me enjoy them in a similar way. Their queerness is always going to be a win, of course. They’re about sports, but not really Sports Books, which I do enjoy, but don’t have to have. And of course, they’re written in third person present, which for me is the absolute queen of tenses. (Many people I know and love very much do not agree, but what can you do.) They’re about people who generally understand their own sexuality, but need to do a lot of growth in other parts of their lives. Lucky Bounce had the bonus of being Single POV, which I stand sort of alone in romancelandia exclaiming delight about.
I saw someone say recently that romance had gotten boring because books don’t have plots anymore. She can have the plots, I’ll take the vibes all day.