baseball | Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Art of Catching Feelings
Author: Alicia Thompson
Publisher: Berkley
Publication date: June 18, 2024
Length: 384 pages
Genre: Contemporary romance
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

A professional baseball player and his heckler prove that true love is worth going to bat for.

Daphne Brink doesn’t follow baseball, but watching “America’s Snoozefest” certainly beats sitting at home in the days after she signs her divorce papers. After one too many ballpark beers, she heckles Carolina Battery player Chris Kepler, who quickly proves there might actually be a little crying in baseball. Horrified, Daphne reaches out to Chris on social media to apologize . . . but forgets to identify herself as his heckler in her message.

Chris doesn’t usually respond to random fans on social media, but he’s grieving and fragile after an emotionally turbulent few months. When a DM from “Duckie” catches his eye, he impulsively messages back. Duckie is sweet, funny, and seems to understand him in a way no one else does.

Daphne isn’t sure how much longer she can keep lying to Chris, especially as she starts working with the team in real life and their feelings for each other deepen. When he finds out the truth, will it be three strikes, she’s out?

Let me get this out of the way to start with: I am not a baseball fan. I’ve watched my share of games, but I don’t seek them out, and if pushed, would probably agree with Daphne’s opinion (America’s Snoozefest). So I certainly started this baseball-themed romance with, oh, just a smidge of hesitation… but I needn’t have worried. Alicia Thompson hits it out of the park with The Art of Catching Feelings! (Sorry, I’ll try to avoid indulging in baseball puns from here on out…)

You’re the book I want to reread. For the rest of my life.

Have more romantic words ever been spoken?

In The Art of Catching Feelings, newly divorced Daphne — who couldn’t care less about baseball — attends a home team game courtesy of her brother, who works for the team. And because the seats are so good, when Daphne (very drunk) decides to get into the spirit of things by heckling a player, her words hit her target very directly. Not only does the heckled player not laugh it off, he seems to be injured by her words to the point of tears. The moment goes viral, of course, and while he is subjected to an awful lot of public criticism (mainly by trolls), she’s also considered a villain. Who does that to a player on their own home team?

Once Daphne sobers up, she’s horrified by what she’s done, and impulsively DMs the player, Chris Kepler. Chris is usually a great hitter and rock solid at third base, but he’s not having a great season. Daphne works on her apology draft, but somehow in copying and pasting it into the DM, the piece where she identifies herself as the heckler gets deleted. What Chris actually receives is a very nice message from a person known as Duckie, who’s sorry for what he experienced and offers care and concern. He responds back, and soon, the two are exchanging messages that grown deeper and more personal.

Unfortunately for Daphne, her professional life is about to intersect with Chris’s, as she’s asked to step in as a sideline reporter to temporarily replace her sister-in-law who has to take an earlier-than-expected pregnancy leave. At first, having Chris’s heckler step in as a reporter seems like a publicity gimmick, but she’s actually good at this, and soon she and Chris develop a tentative friendship… all the while, continuing her DM relationship with him under her online ID.

The closer she and Chris get in real life, the deeper the hole she’s dug for herself becomes. She knows she needs to be honest with Chris, but can’t see any way to do so without losing him forever. And as their feelings deepen beyond friendship, she really can’t stand the idea of losing him.

The Art of Catching Feelings conveys this dilemma with sensitivity and emotion, while also showing the chemistry and connection between Daphne and Chris. It’s clear from the start that she needs to come clean and set the record straight — but we spend enough time in her head to understand all of her fears and what’s at stake. We may not approve of her decision-making, but we can at least sympathize.

Chris is a lovely character, laser-focused on baseball but dealing with a terribly painful loss that he’s kept hidden from his team until now. He thinks if he pushes past it, he’ll make it through the season, but he’s fraying at the edges and his emotions are raw. Getting to know Duckie is a huge step forward for him in terms of opening up, but the hurt he feels when she ends their connection sets him back quite a ways… until he starts getting closer to Daphne. Confusing, right? He doesn’t know that he’s ended up falling twice for the same person.

This book is such a joy to read, even when things are difficult. The connection between Daphne and Chris is apparent right from their start, and their communication is full of both silly banter and meaningful sharing. Of course we readers know that Daphne is making a huge mistake by not owning up to her true identity, but as she wonders each time she thinks about their situation, if she’d done things differently, would they have ended up connecting the way they did?

Chris’s loss is handled sensitively, as is Daphne’s divorce and the pain associated with her unsuccessful marriage. The author provides content warnings at the start of the book, so the information is easily available for those who prefer to know in advance.

In terms of Chris and Daphne’s chemistry, the sex scenes in The Art of Catching Feelings are explicit (open door). There’s nothing left to the imagination. Personally, I’m tend to prefer these scenes more on the implied side — door slightly ajar or a nice gauzy curtain in between in the action and the reader — but given how much I liked these two characters, it didn’t end up bothering me.

Sure, a couple of elements feel less than completely believable — especially Daphne getting drafted for the reporter role based on her family connection and the fact that she’d been a communications major in college. She ends up growing into it, but it’s a very silly plot contrivance that we just have to accept and roll with.

On the plus side, I love how much of a reader Daphne is, and over the course of their relationship, she and Chris discuss some of their more foundational books, including The Phantom Tollbooth, Catch-22, and Mandy (the lovely children’s book by Julie Andrews). Maybe that’s a piece of why I liked the characters so much — their book talk absolutely made my heart sing.

I’ll be honest — if I’d come across a book with this cover by an author I didn’t know, I’d probably skip right by it. However, I read and loved Alicia Thompson’s two previous novels (Love in the Time of Serial Killers and With Love, from Cold World), so I knew I’d be in for a treat… despite the focus on baseball.

The Art of Catching Feelings is engaging, emotional, and funny, and its main characters are two good-hearted people stumbling their way toward one another. This is a feel-good, absorbing read — a perfect choice for when you want to curl up and get lost in a good book.

Katya, a rising ballerina, and Sasha, a graduate student, are young and in love when an unexpected tragedy befalls their native Kiev. Years later, after the couple has safely emigrated to America the consequences of this incident cause their son, Yuri, to be born with a rare health condition that isolates him from other children. Maggie, a passionate and dedicated teacher agrees to tutor Yuri at his home, even though she is haunted by her own painful childhood memories. As the two forge a deep and soulful connection, Yuri’s boundless curiosity and unique wisdom inspires Maggie to make difficult changes in her own life. And she’ll never realize just how strong Yuri has made her — until she needs that strength the most…

A novel that will make readers examine what it means to live life with a full heart.

The Secret of Clouds is about a young teacher, Maggie, whose enthusiasm for her middle school students and her passion for introducing them to the joys of reading and writing seems limitless. Maggie is asked to take on an additional role, tutoring a 12-year-old boy named Yuri who is unable to come to school because of a health condition. Hesitantly, Maggie agrees, but soon is completely charmed by this lonely boy and becomes determined to help him regain an interest in the world around him.

Bonding through his love of baseball, Maggie slowly draws Yuri out of his shell of apathy, and soon has him engaging with her and the worlds of literature she’s introduced him to with real interest and insight. As she begins to earn Yuri’s trust, Maggie also learns more about his parents, Katya and Sasha, and their desperate love for their ill son.

Katya and Sasha lived in Kiev at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, and while they themselves suffered no adverse effects, like so many others, their offspring suffered birth defects — in this case, a rare heart ailment — due to their own radiation exposure.

Meanwhile, as Maggie witnesses Yuri’s struggles to live his limited life to the fullest, she reassesses her own life and relationships, seeing where her true happiness lies and making the changes needed to live life to her best ability.

The Secret of Clouds is touching and appealing in many ways, yet something about the writing style let me down. It’s the old “show, don’t tell” issue: I felt like Maggie was sharing a summary of her experiences, rather than drawing me in enough to see the events myself. The writing kept me at a distance throughout, as entire months or sometimes years went by in the span of a few paragraphs. There was no sense of immediacy; I rarely felt as though I had entered into a scene or had a genuine moment of emotional connection. For example, when Maggie meets and falls in love with a new man in her life, it’s very nice for her, yet I’d be hard pressed to tell you a thing about him other than that he’s a musician and seems to be a really great guy. Granted, their love story was not the main point of this book, but he feels like a cipher to me.

From the synopsis, I expected Katya and Sasha to have equal time in this novel alongside Maggie, but that’s not the case. While we see their lives in Kiev in the early chapters, once it’s been established that they were exposed to fallout from Chernobyl, the story shifts entirely to its 1999/2000 setting, focusing on Maggie and Yuri. Katya and Sasha become supporting characters, in the background as Yuri’s parents, but not central point-of-view characters.

The Secret of Clouds is a fine read with an interesting story to tell, but unfortunately the writing style kept me from feeling truly emotionally invested. I will say, though, that if every student had a teacher as committed, idealistic, and compassionate as Maggie, the world would be a much, much better place!

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The details:

Title: The Secret of Clouds
Author: Alyson Richman
Publisher: Berkley
Publication date: February 19, 2019
Length: 384 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley