Hey, hey, hey, hey! Let's meet The Prospects!

 

I feel like every so often I’ll just have a bunch of books that I talk about that I say, “I got this from Gay’s the Word” in London, and shockingly, this is one of them. In my defence, every time I go to London now for a gig, I end up going to Gay’s the Word and buying, minimum, two books. The Prospects by KT Hoffman just happens to be one of them.

Our blurb central says that Gene Ionescu is content to play in the minor leagues. He’s seen teammates get their big breaks, but as the first openly trans man in the world of competitive baseball, he has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of. When his former teammate and long-time rival, Luis Estrada, is unexpectedly drafted onto the team, the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life is destroyed. Luis is standoffish, talented and inconveniently gorgeous, and the two men can barely get through a game together. This is war, and the team pays the price. So when Luis surprises Gene with a softer side to his haughty demeanour, Gene offers an olive branch – for the sake of his teammates. Soon they discover that their chemistry on the pitch might lead them all the way to the playoffs. And their chemistry off the pitch… well, that could be enough to change the game forever.

The book opens on Gene’s birthday, on April Fool’s Day, and he’s had a party thrown for him by Vince, his bestie and king who’s letting him rent a space in his house. At this party we see that Luis has been acquired by the team that Gene plays on, so they’re going to be forced together, not Gucci flip flops since it gets super set up that they’re rivals, and the book just goes from there. When I picked this up, I immediately thought that it was going to be a good tropey sports romance, and I was right in thinking that. And with everyone being in the minor leagues that did have me wondering whether it would be an underdog kind of story – which it wasn’t. But in my brain I was thinking, “I love it when losers get to feel good about themselves.” Calling them losers in the sense they’re in the minors, not the majors – as if I know anything about baseball, I never even played the Mario baseball games.

This book being written in third person present tense was absolutely wild for me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the format, it just read so strangely since I’m not used to reading in the form. I don’t think I’ve read anything in this way. In an odd way it’s kind of like a video game that has a narrator as your character goes through the game. You know, a specifically indie game that has some kind of posh, British narrator. But I don’t know what it is, for me, first person feels like it should go with either tense, but third person feels like it should go with past tense. This obviously isn’t a real thing, but it’s just such an odd feeling to read present tense third person.

It did also suffer the same as Pole Position in that I know nothing about sports. I’m a little better with baseball than I am with formula one racing, and that may have something to do with Wii Baseball. Maybe it does, like I know the basics, but when specific terminology gets thrown at me that was when I checked out of reading. It’s one of those things, I know it adds layers to the sports romance, but I just don’t know sports. It’s not a negative by any means. It’s an, I’m not knowledgeable about this sort of thing and also really do not and have never cared about sports in any means.

I loved Gene and Luis in this book. They suffer with ADHD and anxiety respectively and it truly felt like a real showing of both things. Like, somehow in books it’ll get mentioned that characters suffer with these things, and maybe there’ll be a single panic attack included and then that’ll be it. These were things that were ever present throughout the book – the fact that Gene just never finished projects in his apartment, never built his furniture, things like that. And then with Luis, even though he does faint from anxiety at one point, he’s got an emotional support dog, Dodger, also throughout the entire book. Separate to their afflictions, there’s talk throughout the book of Luis getting drafted up to the major leagues and, spoiler, when it happens, I loved seeing Gene’s thoughts on it. Gene went through the series of emotions of obviously being happy for Luis, while still being jealous at the same time. And I just love when we get a two things can be true moment. Like, yeah, he’s going to be happy for Luis, since that’s the man he’s with in the book, but he’s also going to want to be getting drafted for the major league himself, so he will be jealous.

The book, while being so baseball focused, isn’t about baseball, as so many romances aren’t. I’m not saying that every romance book isn’t about baseball (what a statement), I’m saying it’s more about the relationship, and the people, more than it is what’s going on around them. And this is ultimately what I always end up meaning when I say in other posts that I need something else going on around romance in a romance book. You know, this book gives a good example of what I mean, the fact that there’s a whole baseball tournament, people’s careers going on and both Gene and Luis’s insides and attitudes going alongside what’s happening. And I appreciated that it was more than just Gene and Luis getting together and them dealing with what the “outside” has to say about them. Sure, that’s a plotline that’s been done and is so common in books that follow public figures, so I’m glad that it wasn’t something that this one decided to take. The issues were contained solely within the characters themselves.

This was also a book where a character being trans wasn’t a central part of it. It was in the sense that, obviously with Gene being trans, then it’s a central part of just who he is fundamentally. I want to make my point by saying we should have more books written by and just generally starring trans people – I just think that’s something the world should have. This is the perfect kind of book that I’m referring to, Gene’s trans-ness was never a hurdle in the book. This is one of those things where different stories are saying different things, this was just a romance book where Gene just happened to be trans, and that it made no difference to it being a mlm romance. That is… gay romance, not pyramid scheme romance. Which does lead me to a question I have: is there a Herbalife romance novel?

Okay, bye!