“You Should Be So Lucky” is a 2024 Historical Fiction novel by Cat Sebastion. It takes place during the 1960 baseball season, when newcomer Eddie O’Leary has just been traded to a brand new team called The Robins in New York City, and promptly enters a batting slump. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to hit the ball anymore. Meanwhile, reporter Mark Bailey is assigned to ghostwrite Eddie’s diaries for the paper he writes for, The Chronicle. Or, should I say, used to write for. Because Mark hasn’t been doing much writing lately. For the past year and a half or so, Mark has been grieving the loss of his partner, William, and because William was so secretive about their relationship, Mark isn’t able to talk about it with anyone besides the three or four people who already knew. Whenever these two lonely souls are together, sparks fly, but Mark doesn’t want to be someone’s secret again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete in 1960. Can they find a way to make it work?
The first thing I need to talk about is that this book is technically book two in a two part series, called the “Midcentury NYC” series. However, the two books are only loosely connected and you can easily read this book as a stand-alone. As far as I can tell, the only things connecting this book to the first is the setting (Mark works for the newspaper “The Chronicle”, the same newspaper company that one of the main leads from the first book inherited.) and that the two leads of the first book show up in this as minor characters. I don’t know if you get more out of this book if you read the first one, but I think I got plenty out of it on my read though even though I didn’t. But, that is something you might want to consider.
So, right off the bat I’m going to say that I don’t know how historically accurate this book is. I don’t know much about baseball in the 1960’s. (I mean, I’m assuming that they played the game the same way as it’s played now, and I know that The Robins team that Eddie plays on is fictional, but that’s as far as I know.) And I don’t know much about New York City in the 1960’s or what it was like to be LGBT back then, other than the fact that it was probably much harder than it is now, even in such a progressive area as NYC. So I don’t know how accurately it portrays what it would actually be like to be a queer person in that era. But I enjoyed the story regardless, I like that it’s a happier, more hopeful novel, despite the time period it’s set in. It gives the reader some hope, that maybe if the characters can work things out in 1960, so can we, even in these troubled times. And having hope and moving on after loss is a big theme of this book, so the more hopeful tone matches.
Like I said previously in this review, Mark is grieving the loss of a partner that he wasn’t allowed to be public with. While Eddie is grieving the loss of his batting skills, his former town, and a part of himself that he has to keep a tighter lid on now that he’s becoming more famous and more people are watching him. It’s not the same as the loss of a partner, but it's a loss all the same. One of the side characters, George Allen, an 80-something year old sports reporter for The Chronicle, talks about how just the act of getting older is a type of loss, that loss is inevitable. You get older, time moves on, and things don’t stay the same, and that inevitably means that some things are lost. And the characters never do get back what they lost. Mark will never have William back, and even though Eddie does technically break his slump, he doesn’t get his old swing back. It’s not as easy for him as it once was.
But, as George Allen also points out, another part of getting older is getting to experience new things. Mark may never get William back, but he has a chance to start something new with Eddie. Eddie doesn’t get his old swing back, but he finds a new one, one that works for him now, and not the starry-eyed rookie that he once was. It’s a story about loss, but it’s also a story about living again, about second chances, about how things can turn around again after a downward spiral, how you can find love again after losing it, how people enjoy cheering for the underdog so they can feel that sense of hope when they finally catch a break, when they finally win. And that undercurrent of hope runs throughout the entire story, even during the saddest sections.
Another strong theme of this book is secrecy, and how much of yourself you start to lose when you have to hide who you are. When I first read the summary of this novel, when it explained that Mark didn’t want to go back in the closet again and Eddie couldn’t be out, I thought that Eddie would try to get Mark to tone down his queerness. But no, Eddie is willing to risk it all in order to be with Mark, it’s Mark who tries to turn Eddie down, insisting that he can’t risk his baseball career to be with him, that he can’t be the one to ruin his life. While Eddie insists that being with him would not ruin his life, that he’s worth it, and why can’t believe that? Mark doesn’t really have an answer for him. I don’t want to spoil what happens in the end, or how they work it out, but let’s just say that they come to a compromise. They take things day by day, which, in the end, is really all you can do.
So, suffice it to say, I really enjoyed this one. I do have some issues with it, like, in my opinion, the book doesn’t really have a strong ending. It just kind of stopped. And it’s not really a plot-driven novel, it’s mostly a character study about these two people who have lost a lot and how they manage to move on from that and work out a relationship together. But a lot of my complaints are just nitpicking. If you like historical settings, specifically mid 20th century, and the potential inaccuracies don’t sound like they’d bother you, I definitely recommend it.
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