skygiants: daniel kahn & the painted bird parading through the streets with a sign that says 'klezmer bund' (klezmer bund)
[personal profile] skygiants
Traditionally 'on airplanes' is the time when I read a lot of easy-to-read ebook romance! Unwritten Rules, a gay baseball romance, is a perfect airplane book which unfortunately I could not seem to figure out how to download to actually read when my devices were in airplane mode, so instead I read it mostly in airports and in hotel rooms. Same energy, though.

I think I first saw this as a rec from [personal profile] wakeupnew, later reinforced by a comment in another groupchat about lesbians and gays supporting the minors ... the "baseball should probably unionize" subplot is relatively small but, as was predicted, unsurprisingly near and dear to my heart (and also timely as it happens!) It is also usefully emblematic of the things I liked very much about the book as a whole: the thoughtful and unglamorized look at baseball-as-profession, the central and open-ended and pleasingly unresolved! question of whether the the benefits of building one's life around a sport one loves are worth the many costs levied by participation in the baseball-industrial complex.

The primary plot of course is the toll that baseball capitalism inflicts on queer romance: the story takes place across two timelines, one in which catcher Zach Glasser is just meeting Eugenio, the fellow catcher who will eventually become his ex, and one three years later in which they are encountering each other again after breaking up because of Zach's unwillingness to jeopardize his career by coming out of the closet before he earns his baseball pension.

The romance is lovely, and the double timeline worked well for me in providing emotional weight and stakes, but honestly the thing I liked best was the baseball worldbuilding .... I mean, I am probably the last person on Earth who could tell you whether the actual pro-baseball world as depicted in this book is in any way accurate to reality, but it convinced me of its plausibility and made the book feel very compellingly specific and grounded, my streak of enjoying baseball-themed media despite the relatively percentage of time in my life taken up with any sort of sportball whatsoever continues apace.

Date: 2022-09-05 03:31 am (UTC)
wakeupnew: Trees strung up in red-pink Christmas lights with giant blue-lit spheres hanging from the boughs ([scenery] turn on the lights)
From: [personal profile] wakeupnew
I think I gave a blanket thumbs up to KD Casey's queer baseball romances, which is very much true!! I enjoyed them all. My absolute favorite is One True Outcome -- the anxiety rep, expressing love through books, and the 'getting older and having to accept that things will never be the same and find new ways to go on' of it all truly destroyed me, 10/10 would cry at baseball again

Date: 2022-09-05 04:28 am (UTC)
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)
From: [personal profile] chestnut_pod
Despite emphatically not caring about baseball IRL, I am a sucker for sports RPF, and it sounds like this might scratch many of the same itches!

Date: 2022-09-05 02:50 pm (UTC)
littledust: Jack carrying Bitty bridal style. ([cp!] i got my angel now)
From: [personal profile] littledust
"Baseball should probably unionize" sounds like an awesome subplot, small or not! I really liked the preview of the book at the end of One True Outcome, so bumping it up on the TBR. (I read OTO and loved the leads for the reasons [profile] ilikeautumn mentions, enjoyed the baseball, and thought the romance was a fine thing to happen to two very nice and lonely people.)

Date: 2022-09-05 05:12 pm (UTC)
theladyscribe: Canadian baseball player Rene Tosoni after being pied in the face (oh canada)
From: [personal profile] theladyscribe
Can confirm the baseball stuff in this book (and Casey's others) is mostly pretty accurate! (As someone who both worked for a minor league team and also got to read the early drafts of some of her works (one of which was originally written as a gift for meee)).

This is also a reminder that I should download and read the rest of the books lol, so thank you! XD

Date: 2022-09-05 09:28 pm (UTC)
obopolsk: (Default)
From: [personal profile] obopolsk
I love KD Casey's books! (The newest, Fire Season, is also wonderful.) I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on the baseball accuracy, but one of the things I appreciate about these books is how much they feel like a baseball game—there's a sort of slowness to them that just says "baseball" to me.

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