I really shot myself in the foot with this one.

If you caught my “update” post about my goal to read one fiction and one non-fiction book based on a chosen theme each month, you’ll know that April’s theme was: Falling Back in Love With Love.

That’s juicy, right?

Do you want to know why I–a gleefully delusional lover-girl–fell out of love with love? What romantic terrors shook me up so badly that the thought of love nauseated me? If anyone deserves the details, it’s my 31 loyal monthly blog visitors. Instead of a novel-length drama, here’s an excerpt from something I wrote:

I fought for love. But effort and commitment and care can’t be one-sided. It wore on me and it wore on my belief in and want of love. That realization was harsher than losing the relationship. After I walked away, I realized that I’d become a bit cynical. Not only because what I thought was love had been…something else. But because I looked around for examples of love–couples I aspired to be like–and struggled to find many aspirations.

You understand? You understand why I went into ChatGPT and said, give me romance; give me a love story; give me a happy ending! Well, it gave me The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory. Surely a sweet romance…but it was a hetero romance.

No thanks. My faith in love needed to be repaired in the same way it was broken. Queerly.

Back to ChatGPT: Give me something queer; give me a masc and a femme; throw in someone non-binary! They just have to fall in love and stay in love!

Enter: Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly.

The title didn’t sound too promising. I wanted something sweet and uncomplicated, not disastrous. But the other options didn’t sound very enticing, which is another conversation. Should I write a queer romance? Don’t answer that. I’m doing it anyway.

Regardless, I loved all of the little disasters in this novel. I expected what I asked for: a lighthearted, easy to read little novel that would rehydrate my shrunken heart. Instead, I got a well-written romance that hooked me halfway through.

So, what’s it about? Glad you asked. Love & Other Disasters is written in third person and shifts between the perspectives of Dahlia, a late twenties woman who just got divorced from her high school sweetheart (a nice man named David) and signed up as a competitor on a cooking show while she struggles to figure out what’s next for her, and London, a non-binary person who really loves Nashville, has money, but also wants the cooking show prize money to open up a non-profit for the LGBTQIA+ community.

Writing out that London has money but is competing for money just annoyed me. It annoyed Dahlia too at one point, if I recall correctly. Anyway, the two have a cold first meeting…and eventually things heat up.

I know that’s vague. How am I even supposed to write reviews? I’m out of practice and allergic to spoilers. Read the book.

I do want to talk about two things…the writing and the queerness. Let’s start with the latter.

Quick, think of every queer trope you can. What do queer stories always center around? Self-discovery, fear of ostracization, coming out, violence, hate crimes, and death. Those are real issues for our community, and I don’t want to downplay them, but I do want to see more queer joy. I want to see queer people catering to their passions like cooking, writing, music, or building a non-profit. And I love that Anita Kelly was able to keep the characters and their passions central to the story rather than focusing solely on queer struggle. Because, yes, there were rough family dynamics and, yes, someone does come out, but it’s a minor blip. And, as a queer person who is constantly coming out to new and old people in my life, I’m exhausted. For me, it is a blip, because I have things to do and passions to focus on. My queerness is simultaneously one of the best things about me…and as irrelevant as my brown hair.

Now for the writing.

I like Anita Kelly’s writing. Did I underline incredibly well-written lines and draw hearts all over the pages? No. I don’t think I was supposed to. The writing was easy to read, but not in an elementary way. We’ve all read those books, right? Where the writing is a bit too simple and you trod through just to get the story out. Kelly’s writing is a few steps above that, so much so that I’m planning to see what else they’ve written. I’m a fan.

Speaking of being a fan. I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I do. The morning after I finished it, I woke up thinking, “Oh, I can’t wait to read more of that story.” Only to sadly remember that I’d finished it. But I hadn’t been a fan from the start. It wasn’t boring or anything, it was engaging enough. I appreciated that the author didn’t go too far into the technical cooking details or fall into the trap of food metaphors. I’m sure that was hard to avoid.

But you know when it got good? You know when I got hooked? When I realized, to my shock, that this was a steamy book. How did I not know? Why did I think that the author was going to fade away from steamy scenes? And, yeah, you could call me a grubby pervert for being hooked at that moment. However, I will argue that those scenes were so important. Not just for the character development or plot progression, but for the culture. They were honest, playful, and sweet. Respectful and realistic as they navigated intimate moments for the first time, feeling out each other’s boundaries, especially as one character was non-binary. I found it cute; I found it relatable.

And, speaking of relatable, I loved how shoulder-shrug queer Dahlia’s character is. No figuring out if she’s attracted to London. No agonizing over her identity. Just – Oh yeah, you didn’t know I was queer? I am. Let’s do this.

I know there’s a time and a place for the queer crisis, the self-discovery side of things. Maybe I’m burnt out on those stories because I sought them out incessantly when I was in that phase of life. But as a 33-year-old seasoned queer just wanting to love love again, Love & Other Disasters was just what the AI doctor ordered.

So this month’s fiction goal was met. I read the book, felt my heart grow a half-size, and was inspired to write. I didn’t write fiction though. I was a bit mesmerized by the newness of Dahlia and London’s relationship, the queer romance.

It tossed me back into reverie.

Soon, I found myself writing an essay about my most recent single summer, a “hot girl summer” if you will, in 2022, which happened to coincide with the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a sappy sweet story, but has a few little disasters, just like this book. I think that’s the clearest indicator that Anita Kelly delivered something special with this novel.

At the same time–like I said at the start–in trying to revive my heart I was transported back in time… and promptly shot myself in the foot.

four stars.