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This is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reach, and reach for until they are tattered and yellowed and full of scribbled notes, which is to say, until they are well-loved.

If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.

You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.

I cheered so hard for the characters�� happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself.