I love this gorgeous, generous, perfect book and want to have 6 different conversations about it all at once. The acknowledgment section trails into aI love this gorgeous, generous, perfect book and want to have 6 different conversations about it all at once. The acknowledgment section trails into a note that ambushes me with even more love and gratitude: “Reader, your attention—a measure of time, your most non-replenishable resource—is a profound gift, one I have done my best to honor.”
This is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reaThis is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reach, and reach for until they are tattered and yellowed and full of scribbled notes, which is to say, until they are well-loved.
If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.
You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.
I cheered so hard for the characters’ happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself....more
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in tCat Sebastian, I was not familiar with your game.
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in this case) always gets to me. I’m reminded that queer people have loved and grieved and fought and survived through a world that never ceased to want us dead. I wanted to reach into the page and give both Rick and Andy a hug. ...more
nothing is more earnestly good than to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as reading a good romance novel and resurface from it scourednothing is more earnestly good than to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as reading a good romance novel and resurface from it scoured of all hurt, with the sense of being afloat on a sea of light and feeling nothing but a peaceful benevolent love towards all.
in Time to Shine Rachel Reid gives us the gift of a real slow-burn: the game of furtive glances and days that pass in confused undivided tenderness and moments of terrifying vulnerability and a sea of things unsaid. and at the center of it all, of course, two characters who are unsure if they can't bear it or if they simply hunger for more of it. the resulting novel is both gorgeously drawn and absurdly entertaining.
I laughed a lot reading this book. I screamed joyfully a bunch. I also cried so hard at times I didn't realize I was crying until the page got blurry and I couldn't see anything. I cried to see characters, lonely and aching and ashamed enough to hide it, finally release the need to be right, finally give themselves what they need, and finally begin to feel like they’re enough. I cried to see them believe each other's pain and treat each other with joyful tenderness and protect, with ferocious care, the spaces around which they can be vulnerable with one another, and therefore safe, and therefore free.
mostly, I cried to see the betweenness, the permeability, we can allow one another and make it a countervailing force to grief, to bitterness, to loneliness, turn it into something that can bear our weight, and pull us out, that can make a life, once stifling and untenanted, into a place of surprise and enchantment and change, a place of big gatherings and loud conversation and someone else's shoulder against yours in the kitchen at the end of the night, when all is dim and silent and still.
like I said, a good romance novel.
I really loved this book and I recommend it with my whole best heart and I desperately need the universe (Rachel Reid) to produce more of this very specific thing, thank you....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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