We Could Be So Good and You Should Be So Lucky

I will read anything Cat Sebastian writes, so I very much looked forward to We Could Be So Good (2023) and You Should Be So Lucky (2024), considered her “Midcentury NYC” series, set in the 1950s/1960s in New York City. They have some overlapping characters, but can be read standalone.

In We Could Be So Good, we meet Andy Fleming, the heir to the owner of one of NYC’s most popular newspapers. He’s something of a mess, disorganized, and working in the newsroom at his father’s insistence. Nick Russo worked his way up to reporter after growing up in Brooklyn, and is now working on some serious investigative pieces. They become friends, Nick being super-competent while Andy is not, and when Andy’s fiance leaves him, Nick keeps Andy from being alone and wallowing in his own apartment by letting him stay in his spare room. Andy knows that Nick likes men, and eventually Nick knows that Andy knows. What Andy comes to realize is that he is queer, too, and he is very attracted to Nick. It’s a great, slow-burn, angsty romance. There is a lot of fear, with the status of queer people at the time, but also found family and reckoning with one’s family of origin. It’s very sweet, and I loved both Nick and Andy.

In You Should Be So Lucky, prickly reporter Mark Bailey (who is a minor character in WCBSG), is assigned to write a series on Eddie O’Leary, the recently-transferred shortstop for the New York Robins, perennial underdogs, who is in a batting slump that began right after his transfer. Mark had been in a long-term relationship with a lawyer several years older, who had a heart attack and died a few years before, and while they lived together, they were never really out about their relationship. Mark doesn’t want to do that again, he wants to be himself, When he realizes Eddie is not only queer, but sweet and loyal, and that he might be attracted to Mark, that is all kinds of bad since he shouldn’t be toying with someone he’s writing about. And this could be terrible for Eddie, who is something of a minor celebrity.

I do not typically read sports romances, but this was delightful, a grumpy/sunshine, slow burn romance. I loved the overlap between the characters in both books, although there wasn’t a ton of that, but just the idea of happy endings for queer people in the 1950s and 1960s is beautiful. Highly recommend if you need well-written, escapist queer romance. And there isn’t a bit of anti-fat bias–Cat Sebastian does better than that!