Publication Date: June 6, 2023
Synopsis:
[I have opted to remove the comps listed on Goodreads because they are nonsense.]
Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can’t let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy.
Andy Fleming’s newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He’s barely able to run his life–he’s never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he’ll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.
Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can’t deny. But what feels possible in secret–this fragile, tender thing between them–seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they’re willing to fight.
My Review:
I read this book in one sitting – while I was supposed to be reading an entirely different book. I picked it up meaning to read a chapter or two while I ate lunch — because it’s easier to read on a kindle than a paperback while eating — and the next thing I knew I was turning the last page. I can’t remember the last time I did that.
I knew I would love it from the beginning; that was a given – it’s a Cat Sebastian book. But I wasn’t prepared for how much I would love it, or for how many feelings it gave me.
This book is devastating in its quiet queer joy and relentless hope while living in the face of prejudice and hate. It’s about a queer couple in the newspaper publishing world of New York City of the 1950s. It’s about the slow realization of feelings, and the inevitable and infinitesimal merging of lives, and the way you can breathe easier when you have a community of people like you who understand you and know you. It’s about the comfort and happiness to be found in the little things in life. And it’s so soft and domestic, even with the uncertainty and the lies and the hiding. Which takes skill.
I teared up several times, enough that it made it difficult to keep reading. I *felt* the truth in this story viscerally. Times may have changed (somewhat) but I could still understand the hesitance and the fear and defiant joy that make up a queer existence.
In some ways it was starkly different than Cat Sebastian’s other books, and yet in other ways it felt familiar. She straddled the line between quiet joy and simmering rage at the realities of queer life. It was intense and healing and beautiful. I didn’t want it to end.
I was bracing myself for tragedy as the book progressed, and I’m so glad that isn’t the sort of story Cat Sebastian is telling here. That instead she is telling a story of people who just want to live their lives, and who find the courage in themselves to do so despite the fear and threats. Like Nick, I was dreading reading about another queer tragedy.
The characters were beautifully drawn and felt so real. I came to care about them so much and feel like they were my friends. It was masterfully done. The setting also felt incredibly, painfully real. It was 100% believable.
*Thanks to NetGalley and Avon for providing an early copy for review.
Favorite Quotes:
Nick has spent years making sure that when people look at him, they don’t see anything that sticks out like a sore thumb—they don’t see anything at all, they hardly even see a person, just a man in a suit.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
Andy gives him this flat, disappointed look that Nick recognizes because Nick invented it and now he’s going to have to sue Andy for copyright infringement.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“Back in his day they didn’t have Band-Aids,” Nick continues. “They just slapped mud on their wounds and went back to drawing the news on the walls of their caves.”
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“I can still hear you,” Jorgensen says.
“It’s nice when the elderly keep their hearing,” Andy observes.
“It’s the creme de menthe,” Nick says, eying the green liquid distastefully. “It’s like drinking toothpaste, if toothpaste got ideas above its station.”
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“A heart doctor, though,” he says in a tone that suggests that getting jilted in favor of cardiologists is all anyone can expect. That maybe Andy should have considered medical school if he didn’t want to get jilted. That Emily did what she had to do, because who could turn down a heart doctor?
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“I was going to make minestrone soup,” Nick says. “You like soup.”
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“I do like soup,” Andy agrees. “I take it that’s an invitation, not you taunting me with soup I don’t get to eat.”
He feels as if he’s been turned inside out, as if he just learned that a part of his heart is on the outside of his body, in the possession of somebody else entirely.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
But somehow, a journalist being hurt because he’s on to a dangerous story seems less traumatic than someone being attacked for living his life.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
Andy worries that it’s his lot in life to be mocked by elderly Italian women.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
Andy isn’t expecting an epiphany at eight on a Monday morning when he’s still mostly asleep, when his first cup of coffee is still hot in his hand. Honestly, Andy isn’t expecting an epiphany ever.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
A couple times a year, Nick finds a tale of gay misery and woe on his desk, because apparently Bailey has taken it upon himself to be Nick’s personal sad gay librarian.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“You have shitty taste in books. Would it kill you to read something that isn’t totally dismal?”
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“I’m paid for my taste in books,” Bailey says easily. “And I don’t mind dismal things. I’m trying to be your friend, aren’t I?”
Families might usually be bonded by blood, but maybe sometimes they’re bonded by shared secrets, by a delicate mixture of caution and faith, by the conviction that hiding together is better in every way than hiding alone.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
That might be what turns the tide and makes Nick enjoy the book, at least a little. These men are finding time and energy to flirt and have queer parties and get jealous and fall in love despite bombs and injuries and death. That feels like the truest thing he’s ever read.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
“Yes, well. I figured, you see.” He stops, looking suddenly at a loss. “People in New York have hearts, too, don’t they?”
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
And Emily must really love him if she’s susceptible to a line like that.
A few months ago he told himself that his choices—that any queer person’s choices—were either to hide or brazen it out, and that’s still true. But there’s another possibility: pushing back against the injustices that force people to make impossible choices.
We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
Whimsical Dragonette 