TEST
I’m not a sports fan, but I do like a good sports romance, and having read the synopsis of début author KD Casey’s Unwritten Rules, I had high hopes of finding one within its pages. But while the book gets off to a good start, I’m afraid those hopes were dashed before I got to the halfway point. It doesn’t tread any new ground in terms of the storyline (closeted pro player worried about the effect coming out could have on his career) – and that’s fine; tropes are tropes, and it’s ultimately all about what the author makes of them. But while KD Casey can clearly write and really knows her stuff when it comes to baseball, the book has a number of fairly big flaws that make it impossible for me to offer a recommendation.
The story is told entirely from the perspective of Zach Glasser, a catcher with the Oakland Elephants. He’s Jewish (although not particularly observant from what I could gather), he has hearing loss in one ear, and in the first part of the story, he’s been playing in the major leagues for four years. He’s also gay and deeply closeted, he’s never had a relationship and is so terrified of anyone guessing about his sexuality that he seems to spend his life constantly assessing and regulating his behaviour to make sure he doesn’t give himself away. He knows he can’t possibly have a career in professional sport as an openly gay man and has told himself he’ll be able to have a life after he retires. But that’s quite a few years away yet.
Then Zach meets Eugenio Morales, a young up-and-coming catcher at spring training, and although they’re vying for the same place on the team, Zach is asked to take the other man under his wing. Eugenio is a fast learner; he’s also handsome and outgoing and Zach, who has never really allowed himself to get close to anyone, finds it hard to resist his overtures of friendship. It takes Zach quite a long time to see those overtures for what they really are, however; but once he clues in, he and Eugenio (who is bi) embark upon a very secret, very passionate affair.
It’s in the book blurb, so it’s not a spoiler to say that the relationship crashes and burns. Eugenio can no longer deal with the secrecy – and Zach’s near-paranoia – and Zach, despite promises he’s made, is no closer to coming out than when they first got together.
The story is told in two timelines – “three years earlier”, charting the development of Zach and Eugenio’s relationship from their first meeting, and then the “present day” sections which show them getting their second chance after a long separation. I liked the structure, which means we get to see both first and second-chance romances unfold on the page and it generally works well, although the second-chance romance doesn’t feel as well fleshed-out as the first. And that leads me to one of my major issues with the novel as a whole, which is that the romance is pretty lacklustre. I never really connected with the characters or felt the connection between them because there just isn’t enough of who they are outside of baseball; we spend all of the book in Zach’s head, but I couldn’t tell you much about him, and Eugenio’s characterisation is even sketchier. As a result I never understood what attracted them to each other – other than a mutual interest in baseball. Their chemistry is lukewarm at best, and practically all the time they spend together in the first timeline is spent with Zach terrified about someone finding out about then; his fear of discovery permeates the entire story and I found it exhausting at times. I’m not belittling the very real prejudice still faced by gay athletes in professional sport, but in most sports romances, there’s room for some lightness and the joy of making that important connection, of really being seen – but this is just unrelenting fear and gloom and Zach getting in his own way. (I didn’t blame Eugenio one bit for getting out.) And there’s no let-up in the second timeline, which revolves around Zach’s fears of what will happen when he comes out. A lot of the time, Eugenio feels like an afterthought and I came away from the book feeling as though what I’d read wasn’t a romance so much as it was a story about one man’s journey to self-acceptance. The ending is abrupt and something of an anti-climax, and I’m not sure I ever got used to the third person present tense narrative, which seemed like a really odd choice.
But the biggest problem I had with the book is that it’s very baseball-heavy – and I know nothing whatsoever about baseball. Okay, it’s a sports romance, so there’s going to be some actual sport in it, but this isn’t like Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series or Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy’s Him books, where the hockey is present in such a way that even a sports-hater like me can enjoy the story without needing to know too much about hockey. In Unwritten Rules, there is hardly a page without some reference to baseball on it, and while the author does a wonderful job of putting the reader there in the stadium dirt with the players, the rest of the time I was completely lost amid technical terminology and talk of triple-and-double-As, stats, opt-outs, trades and various playing techniques. This meant I had no idea what was at stake for these characters and as a result, couldn’t understand their motivations and decisions. At best it was incomprehensible and at worst it was boring, and I skimmed entire pages of baseball-talk because I had no hope of working out what it meant or why it was important/relevant. I felt like I was reading the book from a distance through a sheet of thick glass. Of course, this is a highly personal thing – if you understand the sport, you may well get more out of the book than I did, although that doesn’t negate the other problems I’ve outlined.
What makes it all the more disappointing is that KD Casey is obviously a talented writer, but she gets so bogged down in the minutiae of baseball that the characterisation and romance are sorely neglected. As a result, Unwritten Rules is a book that will probably only appeal to a very small, niche audience – and I’m afraid that audience doesn’t include me.
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Grade: C-
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 23/10/21
Publication Date: 10/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
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Third person present tense?! I’ve finally gotten somewhat used to first person present tense, which I still find very awkward, but third person present is just..unnecessary, and I imagine, distracting.
First person present, especially when there is only one POV given, feels like someone narrating their life and I find boring and distracting unless done really well. I can’t even imagine third person present..it really would feel like an announcer relaying details as they happen.
Yeah, the third person present felt really odd. I have no idea why someone would opt to use it.
It was done beautifully by Taylor Fitzpatrick in THROWN OFF THE ICE, but that’s probably the exception that proves the rule.
This is the THIRD book I have seen with this cover stock photo. One is Nina Crespo’s Rules of a Rebound, which I reviewed here, and then I saw it somewhere else I can’t remember clearly.
There are some that do crop up a lot. The younger cover model on Layla Reyne’s Trouble Brewing series shows up on many m/m covers, and there are a couple of HR shoots that show up a LOT. And in both cases, they’re years old now! I know dedicated photo shoots are expensive and that there are probably only a certain number of stock photos around, but it does get a bit annoying when you see the same thing over and over.
So many covers get recycled. The cover of Mia Hopkins’s TRASHED is exactly the same as Natasha Madison’s THIS IS LOVE except the model’s tattoos have either been airbrushed in or out. There’s another shot with a shirtless bearded guy looking down that was used on Kelly Jamieson’s IN IT TO WIN IT that must have also been used on about a dozen other covers. SF romance covers are notorious for being recycled. Cynthia Sax once said that she had a folder of screenshots of about 100 different SF romances—all of which had the same cover model/pose, just different details photoshopped in the background. And dark romance covers seem to use the same ten models & poses on an endless cycle.
There used to be a notorious vanity press which cut corners in every respect, including covers so recycled that I started making a collection of those online. Some covers got reused over a dozen times, with titles in the same font. And there was no attempt to even try for different details, because from what I heard, the “cover artist” had about fifteen minutes to do one cover before moving on to the next.
I’m a huge baseball fan (hoping the injury-depleted Dodgers can pull off a miracle against the Braves in the NLCS game tonight) and I’ve said before that I think one of the reasons sports romance writers tend to use hockey as their sport of choice is because (in the U.S., obviously not in Canada) hockey ranks a distant fourth behind football, baseball, and basketball in popularity and any mistakes in terminology, strategy, rankings, etc., are likely to go over the readers’ heads. Of course, the reverse is also true: a writer can get so caught up in the technical details of the sport they’re writing about, the romance gets lost in the weeds. I tend not to read baseball romances because I’m hyper-aware of mistakes—however, I loved the two baseball books Julianna Keyes wrote (TEAM PLAYER and BENCH PLAYER). She did a good job of balancing the sports elements with the romances. I’m hoping she writes more about her fictional baseball team (the Carolina Thrashers), but I think she’s shifted over to mysteries now (writing as J. Keyes or Elaine Murphy).
And in the UK, baseball isn’t even a blip on most sports fans’ radar. Of course, the author is writing for the US market, so there will be more people who understand the game – but it’s a shame, given she’s already writing for a fairly small market (m/m) that she’s made it even smaller by making it so difficult for non-afficionados to understand what’s going on. (I’m sure that wasn’t deliberate, btw!)
Like I said, my beef wasn’t with the inclusion of the “sporty stuff” – it was with the fact that it was way too much for a non-fan to understand and as a result, I couldn’t understand what was at stake for the characters. If you pick this one up, I’ll be interested to know what you think of it.