New favorite sports romance.

Holy crap, I will treasure this story forever. Every Unwritten Rules book feels so *real* when it comes to the emotions, risk, reward, and pain of being a MLB player, as well as being someone young still figuring out your life when reality changes with every team trade. There’s Jewish rep, mental illness and OCD rep, talk about the side effects of being on SSRIs for said mental illnesses (and I have NEVER seen a romance book talk about those sexual side effects of those before, and it’s worth discussing and normalizing!), and there’s emotional backstories of foster care survival and the suicide of a friend. Yet with all of this, it isn’t a painfully angsty book. It’s a beautiful one, with a beautiful love story between two guys just trying to figure out their identities and lives.

I’m also a sucker for any story about a person realizing their life didn’t go how they thought it would when they were 21. This feels like a toast to the “gifted” kids that crashed instead of soaring; a salute to those learning to let go in their 30s.

And it’s a callback to the two previous Unwritten Rules stories that conclude with this final book. We see how being gay in MLB is so hard, maybe harder than other sporting league, since baseball players can be quickly traded for any little inconvenience, so how do you make waves or take a stand? There’s unwritten rules to this kind of life, and I didn’t realize until KD Casey’s writing.

3/5 spice

CW: anxiety/panic attacks, obsessive/compulsive behaviors, and side effects related to medication for these, references to an off-screen death by suicide the death of a parent, and the foster care system.

PS— this is also a testament to when all else fails, Grindr and Untitled Goose Game are there for you.