KT Hoffman

The pressure cooker of minor league baseball leads to major chemistry in this exhilarating, sexy, and triumphant rivals to lovers debut romance. “Tenacious, sexy, effervescent, doggedly hopeful, and endlessly charming, with characters to root hard for and an irresistible voice—I completely adored it.” —Casey McQuiston, author of Red, White & Royal Blue Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life. Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout benches and roadie buses, they begrudgingly rediscover a comfortable rhythm. As the two grow closer, the tension between them turns electric, and their chemistry spills past the confines of the stadium. For every tight double play they execute, there’s also a glance at summer-tan shoulders or a secret shared, each one a breathless moment of possibility that ignites in Gene the visceral, terrifying kind of desire he’s never allowed himself. Soon, Gene has to reconcile the quiet, minor-league-sized life he used to find fulfilling with the major-league dreams Luis makes feel possible. A joyful, heartfelt debut rom-com revealing what’s possible when we allow ourselves to want something enough to swing for the fences.

A Novel

The Prospects

Lindsay

Gene Ionescu has always loved every detail of baseball, but none quite so much as its near- complete indifference to the body. In few other sports can a five- foot, two- inch sprinter appear on the same roster as a six- foot, five- inch pitcher. Size— muscle, height, maybe a few extra inches of reach or long running legs— helps. But baseball also rewards the patient, the crafty, and, perhaps most of all, the optimistic.

Gene, possessing a reckless gay heart that refuses to listen to his smarter, equally gay head, falters.

He has never been much good at wanting things, Gene. It’s a foreign feeling to him. Hope? Hope is comfortable, well- worn. His favorite, most familiar feeling. But hope isn’t selfish; hope is so easy to turn in someone else’s direction. Wanting, though. Wanting has always felt presumptuous— to ask for something, something unlikely and rare, and then actually, really hope to get it? All for himself ? He doesn’t do that.

He understands wanting to look queer. It has made his life harder, but it has also made everything in him quiet in a way he never thought he’d achieve.

For Glenn Burke, Lou Sullivan, & anyone else who had to be the first. Thank you for the worlds of dreaming & hoping & wanting you made possible.

The Prospects is about the people who often get left behind— how we find each other and work to build something incredible in spite of the circumstances. It’s about letting ourselves want those unimaginable dreams that we may never have seen someone like us achieve— the dreams we’ve been told we aren’t allowed to have at all. I hope, when you read this book, you feel allowed. I hope you stop feeling like you need permission at all.

Does he know what that smile does to a defenseless homosexual?

with those strong wrists that Gene would like to put to good use.

The Prospects quotes

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