Review: "Cleat Cute" by Meryl Wilsner

 

Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner
Published September 2023 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★★

On the field together, they're good...off the field together, they're better.

I ended up thinking a lot about the evolution of lesbian romance as I read this. When I first started reading lesbian fiction, I went to the library armed with a handwritten list of books carefully sourced from the pages of Fun Home. (It was the 2000s North Carolina, so it's a minor miracle that the library had any of the books on my list.) When I started finding lesbian romance (definitely not at the library in North Carolina), it was so uniformly terrible—this does not mean that I did not love it, but it was terrible—that I classified almost the whole genre as Bad Lesbian Romance. I was pretty sure that Good Lesbian Romance also existed, but the more general realm of Lesbian Romance was so small to begin with that my chances of finding the good stuff were...not great.

Guess what? It's 2023. There's a whole lot more out there now, and that means there's a whole lot more good stuff. Even now I'm still getting used to the idea that I can pick up a lesbian romance and it won't be full of cartoonishly evil white men with slicked-back hair, chomping on their cigars as they leer at women and make plans to topple the gay agenda.

Enter Cleat Cute: manages to hit some of my favorite tropes (I don't give a whit about sports in real life, but I do in lesbian romance) and some of my least favorite tropes (misunderstandings as conflict) and pull it off...all without threats of violence, homophobia, or violent homophobia. (What can I say—my standards have been permanently damaged by some of the drivel I inhaled in the naughties.) Even the "misunderstanding" trope is pulled off with some aplomb. I tend to grumble about plots that could be resolved dozens, if not hundreds, of pages earlier if the characters would just talk to each other, but what's interesting here is that Grace and Phoebe...they do talk to each other. They do communicate. And when wires get crossed, it's rarely in a Big Dramatic way, but in a "oh, these are two people who see the world from different angles" way. It's genuinely refreshing.

Quibbles, per usual: There is some setup for a villain, but that plotline doesn't really go anywhere. I'm actually glad of it—Evil Villains Who Are Evil are high on my list of eyeroll-inducing romance tropes—but it still felt like it fizzled out. I'm also curious about the choice to push some of Phoebe's "figuring her brain out" stuff (vagueness to avoid spoilers!) into the black hole between the last chapter and the epilogue, as it left me wondering in which ways her experience of the world is different, and is the same, with new tools at hand. Let's call it three and a half stars, rounded up for the sheer volume of happy energy that Phoebe brought to my reading experience.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.