The Prospects Review

By K. T. Hoffman

Star rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Spice rating: 🌶️🌶️

Audiobook rating: 🎧🎧🎧

 Thanks to PRH audio for the gifted audiobook. All opinions are my own.

Blurb

The pressure cooker of minor league baseball leads to major chemistry in this exhilarating, sexy, and triumphant rivals to lovers debut romance. 

Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life.

Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout benches and roadie buses, they begrudgingly rediscover a comfortable rhythm. As the two grow closer, the tension between them turns electric, and their chemistry spills past the confines of the stadium. For every tight double play they execute, there’s also a glance at summer-tan shoulders or a secret shared, each one a breathless moment of possibility that ignites in Gene the visceral, terrifying kind of desire he’s never allowed himself. Soon, Gene has to reconcile the quiet, minor-league-sized life he used to find fulfilling with the major-league dreams Luis makes feel possible.

A joyful, heartfelt debut rom-com revealing what’s possible when we allow ourselves to want something enough to swing for the fences.

Genre: Contemporary Romance

 

Read if you Like:

⚾ MM Romance

⚾ Trans rep

⚾ Mental health rep

⚾ Friends to lovers

⚾ Forced proximity

My Thoughts:

Sports romances where the characters are on the same team are so great! I love watching them go from teammates to more. Teammates spend a lot of time together and it makes avoiding feelings hard.

One thing I learned from this book is that I know very little about baseball. I now know that minor leagues is plural because there is more than one and what a shortstop is. In some ways as a graduate student, I related to the challenges described for the players. Both are low paying jobs that you put up with to get to a better career. For some people, it is worth it and for others, it is not. I liked that this book didn't gloss over that.

It is really fun to watch Gene and Luis go from teammates to friends to lovers. They are in an environment where it is difficult to be gay and in Gene's case gay and trans. I don't think it would have made sense for their relationship to move too quickly. I did like that they supported each other even before they became good friends.

The Prospects does a great job balancing writing about difficult issues like mental health struggles and what it's like to be queer in a largely cis-gender space with a really heartwarming romance and lots of baseball. I am someone who reads sports romance with not a lot of interest in sports so I actually could have done with a little less baseball, but I fully recognize that's a silly thing to ask for. I recommend this to people who like books with good mental health and queer representation as well as people who like sports romance and books about people figuring out the lives they want. Also, there is a very cute dog and some very fun wear my jersey trope.

🌶️🌶️ - This story has a couple of open door scenes. They are described but leave a lot of details to the readers imagination.

🎧🎧🎧 - I listened to the audiobook version of this story. I got used to the narration but initially, it was a bit slow for me and I ended up speeding it up.