Title: You Should Be So Lucky
Author: Cat Sebastian
Publisher: Avon
Release Date: May 7, 2024
Genre(s): M/M Sports Romance, Historical
Page Count: 400
Rating: 5+ stars out of 5
I loved this book in a way that makes me ponder the philosophical meaning of baseball (despite not
being a huge fan of baseball).
It's slow and often seems pointless. It's beautiful, when it isn't a mess. There's a vast ocean of mercy for mistakes: getting hits half the time is nothing short of a miracle, and even the best fielders are expected to have errors. The inevitability of failure is built into the game.It's 1960, and Eddie O'Leary, a sunny shortstop with one of the most beautiful swings anyone's ever seen, sure hands and excellent fielding, has been traded by the Kansas City A's to the New York Robins, a new expansion team scrapping the bottom of the league. He's experiencing a slump, the likes of which is hard to even watch, and the Robins aren't speaking to him because he insulted everyone on the team when he learned he was traded.
Mark Bailey is in the midst of a slump as well, a gray miserable half-life of merely surviving a tragedy that is slowly revealed over the course of the book. He's a writer at the Chronicle assigned to write a weekly diary of Eddie O'Leary over the course of the season.
The stage is set, and what unfolds is gloriously elegiac as the two men move from reluctant collaborators to a sort of friendship and then into a relationship. The book is short on explicit sex scenes, and long on matters of the heart. Here are two men who form a relationship that works in the midst of a time where being gay is something to hide, something to deny.
Eddie and Mark are beautifully articulated, and even the secondary and tertiary characters are fully fleshed out. You end the book caring these people. At 400 pages, I could have easily read another 100 pages and still want more.
And I love the way Sebastian give us deeper things to ponder than merely a meet/cute, fall-in-love relationship. There's the nature of fate, the idea that statistically statistics don't really matter at all, and sometimes ....
Rooting for a team doesn't always mean that you need them to win; sometimes you just want to see them fight, do their best, or even just showing up. Sometimes you want to look at a guy and say: Well, he's fucked, but he's trying.5+ stars for this book. You should be so lucky to pick up this book!
And a final wonderful thought from Eddie: "I'm not saying things happen for a reason - I hate that. I'm saying that things happen. And it doesn't have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide. "
I received an ARC from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
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