Horse Talk Reviews

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian My rating: 5 of 5 stars I don't know what it is about baseball that makes it the perfect backdrop to a story equally about grief as it is romance but it does. Perhaps it is the inherent nostalgic romance of baseball or the skill of Cat Sebastian as a writer but this book was incredible. It felt like the spiritual successor to KD Casey's baseball books (highly recommend everyone read those) while being a completely new and refreshing take on baseball romance. Which it is very refreshing! One of my notes on this book is "weirdly refreshing about sports and homophobia??" because similarly to We Could Be So Good, the historical realism of being gay in mid-century New York - particularly as a well-known professional athlete- is absolutely present, the book is still incredibly hopeful and sweet. And the romance! It's an absolute masterclass on domestic slice of life slowburn. Eddie and Mark are ...

Lucky Bounce by Cait Nary My rating: 5 of 5 stars 5 stars Lucky Bounce is my favorite of Cait Nary's books so far. It's fun, fast-paced, has good hockey content, and I didn't even mind the kid (and i am not a big fan of kids in romance novels). The romance is great too - I was invested in the two main characters getting to know each other and eventually figuring it all out. There was some Personal Family Stuff with both dudes that wasn't really explored in depth or resolved at all but I don't enjoy family drama so I didn't mind that it kinda went nowhere.  The ending is probably my biggest complaint because it is A B R U P T. It seriously just ends with the world's most vague sentence and i kept trying to turn the page for more but nope. Nothing. If this was beefed up a bit it would be 5++++ stars lol. Still worth the read and a great addition to the annals of gay hockey romance. I received an ARC copy of this book from Ne...

Light Up the Lamp by Kit Oliver My rating: 3 of 5 stars 3 stars Perhaps my expectations were way too high but this book did not live up to them. Let's set aside the absurd shithole-level arena and facilities for an NHL team that would never be allowed and the training camp with roughly 6 people in attendance and focus on the non-hockey parts. First of all, the miscommunication in here was off the charts. Poor Gil tries so hard but he only knows how to speak in hockey and no one helps him out at any point they only ever say "Oh, Gil" to him. Someone please help my buddy out and clearly explain the problems!!! How is he supposed to know anything at all he has one brain cell and it's dedicated to hockey and thinking "Sebastian" 500 times a second but he's so willing to try if only someone would guide him :( This made the entire book frustrating to read because the 80% breakup is Gil speaking in his single-minded hockey w...

Baseball Field Guide, Fourth Edition: An In-Depth Illustrated Guide to the Complete Rules of Baseball by Dan Formosa My rating: 5 of 5 stars 5 stars I decided it would be a really good idea to get into baseball for real because I read a baseball romance book or two and was ~influenced ~. I thought I would be able to pick it up quick because I've been regularly exposed to baseball as I am a red blooded American and you can't go five feet without ending up in a ballpark or watching Moneyball again. But that was my sports watching hubris tricking me because baseball is absolute nonsense to watch (or listen to) if you don't know what's going on. That's where this book comes in! I wanted a quick reference for the structure of the game and the rules because the best way to tell sportsbros they are wrong on the internet is with citations. The baseball field guide was especially helpful because it has a chapter on how the game is played a...

Game Misconduct by Ari Baran My rating: 3 of 5 stars 2.5 stars rounded up This book was straight up baffling to read. The two main components of the book, the hockey and the romance, were equally weird and made me question if I knew anything at all about hockey or reading romance. To start, the hockey. I was initially ok with the idea of the two main characters being enforcers but they were Extreme Enforcers who fought multiple times every game. In the year of our lord 2023, hockey fighting and enforcers are barely a thing. The players in real life hockey who fight a lot have maybe 12-14 fights an entire season! What makes it even more confusing as a character choice is this is a league that's progressive enough to have a female hockey player. It makes no sense to have both of these be true at once and still have a homophobic league. As for the rest of the hockey it was all a little...off. Like words might be used in hockey but they were slightly...

Diamond Ring by K.D. Casey My rating: 5 of 5 stars KD absolutely nailed it with this one. Or, since it's a baseball book, knocked it out of the park? Whichever metaphor you choose this book was amazing, perfect, 10 out of 10, no notes. Like, how dare this book. It's amazing to see an already great writer improve upon their craft. All the things that bugged me from the first two books in this series were fixed and all the things I loved were still there. The writing struck the perfect balance of melancholy, baseball, romance, and character development which the dense and poetic writing style complements well. The other things I loved about the book: the two main characters, Jake and Alex; the baseball; the mental health rep; the linear storytelling; the more conclusive ending; less of the book dedicated to the first chance romance; the build up of the second chance romance; the baseball as a rebellion rep; the proper name pronunciation rep; the...

Gravity by Tal Bauer My rating: 4 of 5 stars 4 stars This review has spoilers! Okay look I love Tal Bauer's particular brand of schmaltz and I love how over the top everything is and this book hit the dramatiques big time. The extreme Tal Bauer-ness of Gravity was kind of a lot honestly. 1. The hockey! I am a big hockey fan and my team has made several deep playoff runs in a row so I am deeply familiar with the sport. Tal's hockey was fairly technically accurate albeit improbable at points. The stuff that was wrong can be excused as narrative decisions. The brutality of the last quarter of the book is where it gets a bit, um, wtf for me. Bryce (one of the main characters) blocks a puck with his NECK and bleeds everywhere and has to get major surgeries during the playoff run and recovers enough to play in the Stanley cup final game 7 approximately 6 weeks later. So, yes, players do return after major surgery in the playoffs etc but holy crap T...

His Secret Omega Co-ed by Ava Beringer My rating: 3 of 5 stars A solid 3 star omegaverse mpreg book. With a cover like that 3 stars is exactly correct. It was enjoyable enough even though I have a suspicion it was a vehicle for the author's stance on the pharmaceutical industry. In my fluffy mpreg??? Yikes. The pacing was a bit all over the place with huge time jumps and then suddenly a very detailed description of the omega's heat and then more time jumps. What the book chose to gloss over and what it chose to describe in excruciating detail was a bit weird. The romance between the two main characters was cute. The dramatic past and secret omega stuff kinda dragged on and on. And there were way too many "jokes" and "references" and other cringe nonsense in the dialogue. So yep 3 stars. View all my reviews

Fire Season by K.D. Casey My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was the second baseball book I read by KD Casey and of the two (Unwritten Rules, and this one, Fire Season) Fire Season is the more accessible and traditional romance. The baseball is less important to the main characters - it's still really important since it's their whole job, but it's not nearly the same level as Unwritten Rules - and the baseball is easier to understand. The romance isn't as melancholy or dense and is a straightforward domestic slowburn. While these might be good things to other readers, I find KD Casey's writing style suited for a dense story and the simple romance and less focus on baseball in Fire Season made it the weaker book of the two. I'm trying not to compare the books so much but I read them really closely together so I can't help it. Some things I thought were done well was the integration of the ex-wife character without making her a v...

Contract Season by Cait Nary My rating: 4 of 5 stars Horse rating: 🐴 of 5 horses ARC difficulty: escalator Expected publication: September 6th 2022 This was a fun slightly-non-typical fake relationship story, and I really enjoyed the emotions that were present on page. Some unorganized thoughts: • There are no lyrics in this book! Thank all the gods, alive and dead, there are no written out lyrics. The author instead focuses on showing the emotions evoked by the songs played, especially when its Sea playing the song. We get to see how Sea feels, and how Brody is affected by the songs which is what I like to see in general. Emotions!! So this was awesome. • Homophobia, while present given the whole pro-athlete/country star setup, was not an overwhelming presence. It was there, it caused them issues, but it was not a Theme of the book and I appreciated that. • I did not read the first book, and this read just fine on its own. Cameo by the first books couple is brief. • I ...

True North by Corey Kerr My rating: 4 of 5 stars A delightful little book once we got past the trash eating problem bear phase. A phase which lasted a huge chunk of the book really. The beginning read like someone's daily log of activities they did with sentences like "JT worked out and had lunch with friends and came back and the bear was eating garbage in his driveway again." (this sentence was not from the book but it may as well have been). Once either I got used to the writing or the book stopped doing that (I couldn't tell you which it was) it got way better! Less garbage was eaten, more cute romance caretaking was occurring, more quiet domesticity at a summer lake house was vibing. There was also a LOT of dramatique running away into the woods to be a bear because being a human is Hard or whatever and a (view spoiler) that amounted to absolutely nothing except more dramatiques. With less garbage and less dramatiques this wo...

Too Hot to Touch by Katy James My rating: 4 of 5 stars 3.5 stars rounded up This book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed a lot about it such as the creating community, the emotional journey the male main character went on with his sexuality, the fact the diverse sexuality came from the male main character (super uncommon in straight romance!), the inclusion of updates on the couple from the previous book without it being shoehorned in, and how divergent the personalities of the two main characters were and how they tried to make it work. There was also a lot that gave me pause. For example, the female main character is teaching a college course, albeit a non credit course, and never stopped to consider the ethical implications of involving herself with one of her students even if they did sort of know each other already. I don't mind that it was a student/teacher hook up initially but this wasn't even used as a titillating setup it...

Unwritten Rules by K.D. Casey My rating: 4 of 5 stars There is quite a lot of baseball in this book. Like, more than I was really expecting. The entire book is through the lens of baseball and it's all the main character thinks of and it colors every aspect of his life. I did not find the baseball content unapproachable or exclusionary; I don't watch baseball but I could understand the baseball content described in this book. There is also a lot more to the book than baseball (I am saying baseball a lot. Baseball baseball baseball). It's also a very romantic book. The two main characters play on the same team at the same position and meet at spring training on year and their romance slowly develops through the spring training. The book is structured a bit unusually with the present day and a series of flashbacks from when the characters meet to the present day. And sometimes flashbacks within the flashbacks. I wasn't ever lost in the narrative but it does...