The Prospects
by K.T. Hoffman
It was all right! Pretty insubstantial. Verged on being unpleasantly ~representation~ but Hoffman mostly managed a light enough touch that it didn't ruin my enjoyment. (Does anyone really feel that diagnosed+treated anxiety disorders are underrepresented in romance novels?)
I don't know that much about baseball but the baseball-strategy-heavy parts were some of my favorites. I know we're not being shown everything that happened, book is quite up-front about it, but I gotta know - it cannot be true that pro baseball players basically never practice together???
Making myself finish this while being very stressed (about, you know, current events) may have been a mistake, I couldn't get myself into the mood to appreciate the importance of optimism and hope and letting yourself want things.
EDIT: Okay, you know what, actually, giving Vince's husband a marginalized identity in lieu of giving him any noticeable personality is objectively strange, I do wish authors wouldn't do this. It only flies because the man has so little else to do in the novel, which is definitionally not a success. I was interested in Vince, and I can imagine a lot of stuff about him being written and then cut because he is ultimately a side character, so maybe that explains hubby, but even if that's true, the trace left on the page doesn't accomplish the thing it's supposed to! Queer(/fandom) people reading a universe into every scrap of subtext is a beautiful thing, but then the same people write their own books and want to make the subtext text and I get the reasoning but, as art, as text, it doesn't work the same way.