From the archives of lost reviews of 2020—this is the last one!—comes When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri. I was so excited to read a romance centred on two women that was popping up everywhere in mainstream book culture that wasn’t written for young adults (finally!), and I was really hoping that this was going to live up to the hype and do the LGBTQ+ community proud. I was looking for a light read (I had just had a baby and the pandemic was still in the early days where we were naive enough to think the end was coming) and was looking for this to be just the ticket to take my mind off things.

Synopsis
Katie Daniels, a twenty-eight-year-old Kentucky transplant with a strong set of traditional values, has just been dumped by her fiancé when she finds herself seated across a negotiating table from native New Yorker Cassidy Price, a sexy, self-assured woman wearing a man’s suit. At first neither of them knows what to make of the other, but soon their undeniable connection will bring into question everything each of them thought they knew about sex and love.

When Katie Met Cassidy is a romantic comedy about gender and sexuality, and the importance of figuring out who we are in order to go after what we truly want. It’s also a portrait of a high-drama subculture where barrooms may as well be bedrooms, and loyal friends fill in the spaces absent families leave behind. Katie’s glimpse into this wild yet fiercely tight-knit community begins to alter not only how she sees the larger world, but also where exactly she fits in.

My musings
This is a perfectly satisfactory—pretty boring—romantic comedy, though the only thing that really stands out about it is that it’s between two women. Neither characters are really compelling, and their romance, though believable, really just doesn’t feel like it will go the distance. It was a quick read with pretty broad stereotypes and was just fine. I’ve heard other of Perri’s novels are better, so we’ll see if I’ll pick one of those up in the future.

2 STARS

“The time for pretending to be someone she wasn’t—someone supposedly better and more refined—was over.”—Camille Perri, When Katie Met Cassidy

Thank you to Miguel Oros on Unsplash for the featured photo.