Unwritten Rules: A Gay Sports Romance

4.5 stars rounded down A good debut novel. I confess to looking at a few reviews on Goodreads before writing this one and I found one that was particularly insightful in my opinion. While I don’t agree with everything the reviewer wrote, what was written is so much more concise than anything I’m able to write. There’s no way I can come close so I’ll just write about some of the impressions I got while reading. This was a long book for me (around 105,000 words according to the author’s website), but I enjoyed reading it. It took me a little longer than normal to finish a book of this length and I think there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is the POV. We’re in Zach’s head but He/His pronouns are used and my research tells me that means it’s third person POV. But it’s not written like any other novel I can remember reading and it took me a little while to adjust to this style of writing. The second reason is the use of so many terms that I didn’t really understand – even in context. One of the reasons I use an eReader is so that I can easily look up words I don’t understand but this book was so full of them that it became tedious instead of educational. What I liked about this book was how the characters interacted with each other. I also enjoyed the shift in the timeline – between present day and 3 years ago when Zach and Eugenio met. I sometimes find books that shift between two or more timelines difficult to read but I had no trouble with this one. While I know next to nothing about baseball, I used to enjoy watching the local farm team play when I was a kid – many, many, many years ago. So, I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes baseball stuff a lot, even when I didn’t understand all of the jargon. I had more difficulty with the ethnic languages/terms used. Note: I don’t mean anything disrespectful and not understanding a lot of the terms is really my problem and not necessarily the writer’s. I’m only mentioning this because it did take me out of the story a few times but, again, this is more my problem to solve than the writer’s. I actually really enjoy reading books that challenge me to understand and learn new things. I just think that there was so much in this book that it was a little overwhelming for me at times. Once I really got into this story, I had difficulty putting it down. Eventually my sleepiness couldn’t be ignored so I had to wait and finish it when I woke up. When I noticed that I was nearing the end of the book I knew there wasn’t enough left for me to be completely satisfied with how it ended. I’m one of those readers who almost always wants more but I really did feel a bit cheated that this book didn’t have an epilogue. I mostly feel like there was an HEA but also think it leaned more towards an HFN. I wanted to know more about their life a few months or years down the road. I hope that there will be more books in this series and that Zach and Eugenio appear in them to give us a glimpse of how they are doing. A review copy was provided by the publisher via NetGalley but this did not influence my opinion or rating of the book.

I enjoyed this book. This second chance romance was a hard hitter emotionally. The story was nicely written and held my attention well. I thought that Zach and Eugenio were likable and I felt they were easy to root for. All together a good read. I am electing to post a forthright review.