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The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.
Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.
Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.
Rating: A-
Set in the same world as We Could Be So Good, Cat Sebastian’s You Should Be So Lucky is another gorgeously romantic and tender story that, while dealing with some heavy topics, manages to be warm, funny, honest and uplifting – and reminds us that although life might suck at times, it can also be wonderful, especially when you find that one special person who can lighten the load.
It’s 1960, and rising baseball star Eddie O’Leary was having a great season with the Kansas City Athletics when he found out, on live television no less, that he was being traded to the New York Robins, a brand new team languishing at or near the bottom of the league. Not surprisingly, his reaction wasn’t the best, and his invective-filled outburst – also relayed live – made for big news up and down the country. To make things worse, he hasn’t played a decent game since and is experiencing a slump that might well be career-ending, his team-mates are ignoring him, and he’s still living in a crappy hotel room, mostly because he doesn’t think he’ll be sticking around long enough to get himself a place of his own.
When Andy Fleming, editor of the Chronicle, approaches arts writer Mark Bailey and asks him to consider penning a high-brow sports-based feature for the paper’s new weekend magazine, Mark is sceptical, to say the least. Andy wants to publish a weekly diary following one of the city’s ball players over the course of the season, but Mark isn’t particularly interested ghostwriting for a ball player, and when Andy tells him that the player he has in mind is Eddie O’Leary, Mark is even less so; he can’t think of anything more likely to get someone to throw their paper directly into the nearest trash can. But Andy is tenacious. He reckons there’s more to Eddie than the headlines suggest, and is sure that Mark is absolutely the man for the job. Mark still isn’t convinced until, at home, he watches the Robins’ game on television and realises that whatever is going on with Eddie O’Leary is a disaster – and that maybe here is something he can write about after all.
The last thing Eddie expects, when he’s summoned to the manager’s office, is to be told he’s to take part in a series of interviews for the Chronicle. He can’t do anything but agree to it, of course, but he can’t help hoping, when the reporter doesn’t show up in the locker-room after the next game, that the plan has fallen through. And then he notices the man standing apart from all the other sportswriters, leaning gracefully against the end of stall and turning the pages of a book, seemingly untroubled by the surrounding chaos. Eddie is completely blindsided by the other man’s casual poise and handsome face – even though Eddie has turned not noticing handsome men (especially in locker rooms) into an art form – but manages to get through the introductions without babbling something ridiculous. But when Bailey suggests they should get dinner, Eddie blurts out a ‘no’ so fast as to be rude – his teammates have enough reasons to hate him without thinking he’s cosying up to a sports reporter. Realising he’s put his foot in it, he quickly suggests he and Bailey meet the next morning instead – although he doesn’t stick around long enough to actually arrange a place and time. When morning arrives, and feeling embarrassed at having behaved like such a dick the previous day, Eddie decides the stadium is where he’ll most likely find the reporter – and is surprised when he steps from the elevator into the lobby of his hotel to find Mark there waiting for him.
You can read the rest of this review at All About Romance.