#kd casey

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! We’re celebrating as we do with books starring Jewish protagonists and/or by Jewish authors, and for more recs, check out previous years’ posts! Picture Books Shabbat is… by A.J. Sass (text) and Noa Kellner (illustration) What does Shabbat mean to you? Is it making a big meal with your relatives on Friday night? Singing songs on Saturday morning? Or maybe…

Characters, book, and author names under the cut

For day 28: To round out the romance section, and the month of queer reads, I bring you the subcategory of Gay Sports Romances. I think I picked up KD Casey because Cat Sebastian recommended Diamond Ring on instagram, and that was it for my and this rabbit hole. 

So, first off, I must state that I do not care for sports. Like, I don’t hate them, because that’d be way more feelings toward a thing I do not care about. But for any given sport event happening on the TV, I’d rather be in the other room reading a book. Ironically, it might be a sports romance.

KD Casey does not hate sports. In fact, they care about them greatly. All the baseball fanning, all the baseball knowledge. When I explained my new-found interest in sport romance novels to my coworkers (all of us high school English teachers), one of them said, “Oh, so you read sport romances like it’s sci fi.” To which, yes, except I know way more about space ships in the far flung future (or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) than I do about baseball. 

But these were fun. The series actually is called Unwritten Rules, and it starts with Unwritten Rules, but I think I read them Fire Season, Unwritten Rules, Diamond Ring, which is 2, 1, 3? Anyway, there’s some flashback stuff going on, so it wasn’t too far off. There’s lots of sporting happening in these books, but also very gorgeous men with lots of feelings and internalized homophobia. Actually half of the characters have no internalized homophobia, but that’s part of the angst. Sports, as we can imagine, whether we like sports or not, is not a world that’s super open for gay people of any stripe, and part of sports as the setting presents some built-in conflict for the characters. If you’d like your romances without homophobia, these probably aren’t for you, but I think I mentioned how much I like angst, and these deliver on that. 

KD Casey makes writes some great tension, steamy sex, and compelling characters who all have some serious baggage. There’s also stuff about recovery, injury, and physical disabilities (one of the MC in Unwritten Rules is hard of hearing, which is always present but isn’t actually part of the conflict of the story.) 

# of books read: 6

Psycho (Necessary Evils #2) by Onley James ★★★☆☆

Off Limits (Secrets Kept #1) by Riley Hart ★★★☆☆

Dirty Slide (Dirty Players #1) by Lauren Blakely & KD Casey ★★★☆☆

Death (The Four Horsemen #4) by Laura Thalassa ★★★★☆

Believe Me (Shatter Me #6.5) by Tahereh Mafi ★★★★★