TWO LEFT FEET, gay Premier League football...soccer in the US...version of the trendy gay romance series we all love

TWO LEFT FEET
KALLIE EMBLIDGE
Dell Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Premier League football star must defend his roster spot—and his heart—when a threateningly talented and handsome midfielder joins his team in this utterly charming debut romance, a profound love letter to the world’s most popular sport.

Oliver Harris is football royalty in London. Ordinarily the star of the Camden Roses is calm, cool, and collected, keeping his club relevant with his prowess in the midfield and mighty left foot. But this season, the threats There’s Camden’s management to contend with—complete with a new, prickly Dutch coach, eager for better results—and a mid-season injury, which sidelines him when his team needs him most. When a recruit is called up to fill in, Oliver fears he’ll be replaced. If he can mentor this younger talent, then they might just have a chance at winning, together.

After a string of lackluster performances in his native Spain, Leonardo Davis-Villanueva is looking for one last shot at the club he always dreamed of, where he once played in the youth academy. Oliver immediately finds confident, eager Leo irritating. He can barely go through the motions, let alone coach him, without outright hostility. When he comes to admire Leo’s skill and warms to his humor and energy, though, he begins to see Leo as a friend—and then, to his mounting horror, as something more.

Leo craves Oliver’s attention and partnership; Oliver can’t afford to fall in love with his teammate. He’s always kept a tight lid on his sexuality in a league that’s never had a player come out. As the season heats up, a lot more than football hangs in the balance. Can Oliver—and Leo—win when it counts most?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oliver, our MC, is a shitty guy: self-obsessed, entirely focused on what's happened *to* him in his life; he's basically a straight man. Except he really wants sex with other guys. Like lots of straight victimvictimvictim men I've known, he thinks he ought to be able to do what he wants to who he wants and be left alone about it. There I agree with him, within consensual boundaries. He's got thhe social awareness to stay on the DL in the Premier League. It's as homophobic a culture as the NHL of Heated Rivalry (in)fame.

So meeting Leo, a hottie with skills equal to his own before his playing career temporarily ended in injury, and slowly, reluctantly falling in love with him follows the grumpy/sunshine, enemies-to-lovers trope nexus. Leo is boundlessly enthusiastic, willing to get in the big fat middle of anything because he's sure it will come out right. As Oliver moves from injured mentor to teammate and partner in an amazing player collaboration with Leo, he realizes he's never been so happy, the team's come out of their scoring slump, and if this beautiful amazing man will have him he wants to be the partner he deserves.

All at once we're in the press-conference-having, coming-out-to-mom part of the story. After the first third-plus of having to put up with his B.S. of pity-poor-me he's healed by Luuuv. Then...finis.

This is a debut novel or I'd have the marshmallow fork out and the logs a-flamin'. I'm going with three stars for what feels like the usual rookie error of not giving the reader intimacy building between the men...even the sex scenes were, well, infrequent and lacking urgency...and an extra half-star for realizing there's a gap in the market that can be filled with a bit of effort. I'd like to see this further honed, fined down into a dart to pierce my wall of ignorance about football; the author doesn't demonstrate a lot of knowledge I can't glean from Wikipedia. I'd call it a competent job of work that could, if seriously expanded on, become a series I'd read.

At the very least it would need to give me more connection and interconnection between the guys, even if it does slow-burn as slowly as this story does; less inner-gaze tediousness..nothing gets resolved until everything gets resolved all at once!...and more of the men exploring their borning connection.

Not for football addicts.

AUDITION, Kiwi social SFF-lite that sets a tendentious trap of prose

AUDITION
PIP ADAM
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room—about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Like Stand on Zanzibar a half-century ago, this story is making a point along multiple fronts of effort. Stylisically it's resolutely avant-garde, modernist, and uses that tradition of liberation from centuries old linear narrative convention to oppose itself as completely as possible. Oppose from what? That verb needs a subject!

It takes the opportunity to set oppositional positions to, well, modernity; the way the modern world steadily relentlessly inexorably shrinks the essential liberty, autonomy, self-determination of Humanity. This is a powerful theme to pursue. It leads into some dark meditations on confinement.

It is most evidently a story in support of the anticarceral abolitionism gaining ground among progressives. More quietly it enables, encourages, examination of the ways individuals accept labels and thus limitations, even when the labels aren't very good fits. It's not foregrounded the way opposition to the carceral state is. It's there for you to consider.

I enjoy novels that expect me to bring my own ideas and knowledge to bear on reading them. I enjoy being asked to hold a thought more than a page or two before the thought pays off, hooks into another thought to make a distinctive picture. It is a pleasure to be exercised and entertained and experience elucidation of a viewpoint while immersing oneself in lovely phrasemaking.

Alba searches around her body and there is not an ounce of homesickness. She misses nothing. She was born into the world and it was not happy to see her. This isn’t her home. She doesn’t want to take advantage or be any more of a burden than she already is here. They hadn’t asked her to come, she hadn’t asked to be there. It isn’t a welcome—it’s an extremely advanced form of attack and defence.

I think that, in its compactness and its rhythm, carries more than surface meaning. Alba's is a point of view I think many could and should attend to. Her sense of...wrongness...is it all external? Is it self-recognition without self-acceptance? Is Alba...are Drew and Stanley as well...forced to keep talking as the means of propelling their starbound prison moving away from Earth in order to get their pasts out of their heads? What does the taking up of physical space have to do with the implied relationship to psychic...emotional...space? All the way into eternal exile and utter Othering in order to get permission to be ecstatically oneself. A price paid without any kind or sort of reward is rare, if one becomes an other self in response to it. A different self, an intentional self, a truthful self.

The ending of this story offers that future of selfness to the giants. It's not found the way a lot of readers will be comfortable with. But if you can read about people told they are too much for this world being thrust out of that world by being squashed into sealed containers and hurled into lethal vacuum, you really should look at why this particular ending bothers you (if it does..I found it the most liberating part of the story).

Pip Adam is a writer who reckons with ideas in her fiction. It's not always clear to me that I'm on the same train of thought as she is. That is, for me as a reader, very interesting and gives a dynamism to the words I'm reading. I experience the need to consider, "did I read that sentence and change my view of the story I thought I was reading by Pip Adam's design or my own?" very involving.

It's a story I felt repaid my attention with well-honed ideas I'd had in duller forms before that. I'd wished, during the read, for...ornamentation...flourishes...a bit of zhuzhery. I can't say the directness of prose was unpleasant or uninvolving, so I can't call it a flaw. I can say that me, reader me, the id that devours Story, wanted it; so I can't offer a perfect five but I can't take much away from that height. It's a cruel place to land:

It’s a strange feeling to know that they will never have to explain this to any of their kind. They will never return. They had been sent to die. That’s clear now. Maybe they had been sent to take over this world, as some kind of front guard or maybe no one that sent them could imagine this. But they are lost to their own world now. They don’t belong where they have have come from and they don’t belong here. They are the only ones of their kind who will make it.

Pip Adam made it.