I read the new Casey McQuiston novel

& all I got was a new lease on life.

Hi! With the help of some serious naps, doggie snuggles, and quiet reading sessions, I am starting to come back to earth after book camp. It really was the experience of a lifetime and I loved sharing it with you.

This time last week, I was in the lovely Reagan National Airport on a layover awaiting my flight home to my family. All I had to keep me company was possibly the gayest book in history.

Indulge me for a moment, please, and let me tell you about it.

If delicious, very steamy, playful romcoms are not your thing, you can skip this one. No hard feelings! You do you. See you on the other side! Don’t forget to have fun!

If you’re still reading - hi! Girls, this one is for us. I mean girls in the most expansive possible way. Everything about this book is expansive. It is maximalist and extra and indulgent and did I mention gay?? It’s so gay. And when I say gay I mean the wide and deep as the ocean, beyond borders, big as the sky, you-can-sit-with-us kind of gay.

Okay, let me back up for a minute. Like so many millennial queers, I read Casey McQuiston’s debut 2019 novel, Red, White, & Royal Blue with the feverish joy and astonishment of new discovery. It’s a silly book. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a deeply queer book. It is the first queer romance I ever read. The happy ending was guaranteed and its promise reached through every page and into me. I didn’t know this kind of book could be for us.

The Great American Novel.

All of this is to say I have been a fan of McQuiston’s work from the jump and it’s been a joy to watch them create. A sapphic time travel novel set in the New York City subway system? Yes please. A YA Mystery/Rom Com that centers a community of queer kids surviving and thriving at their high school in Alabama? Okay!!

Whatever this person writes, I’m going to read it. So when I saw that Casey has a new book coming out this August, I immediately emailed our store’s publisher rep and asked in what I hope was a professional, chill, not at all unhinged way if I could please have an advanced copy whenever they become available? No worries either way, haha, cool, whatever, just in case, thanks, it’s not like I would perish without but, you know, maybe….

The book universe blessed me BIG TIME because what should arrive just days before I left for the bookseller conference in Cincinnati but an advanced copy of The Pairing. Thank you, Lisa at Macmillian! Thank you, World!

I set off for the Bookseller conference in Cincinnati with this wondrous package tucked in my bag and I have to tell you nothing has been the same since.

I know it’s a special kind of annoying to hear someone moon about a book that doesn’t come out for six more months, but I cannot keep it to myself. Place your preorders now and I promise it will be worth the wait.

The Pairing is the story of Theo and Kit, recent exes who find themselves stuck together on an epic European Food and Wine tour. That’s really all you need to know. It’s a second chance romance. It’s Casey’s spiciest book yet. It’s INDULGENT in every sense of the word. There are paragraphs and paragraphs describing pastries and cocktails and sunsets and fields of wildflowers,

and gorgeous gay sex, which I don’t know how to talk about yet so I’m making this tiny because I’m still unlearning shame, but it’s in here and it’s beautiful…

I’ve heard a lot of books described as “delicious” or “engaging all the senses”, but no one has ever done it like Casey.

This book centers pleasure like nothing I have read before. I don’t know how to say it except it made me happy to be alive. It made me want to live differently.

There is a shift about halfway through that knocked me out. Casey plays with gender in the most profound, fun way in this book. It feels like they are winking at us. It feels like they have leveled up.

Picture me on a plane, holding on to this little paperback for DEAR LIFE as the serious business man next to be does, I’m sure, serious business things.

Picture me at the bookseller conference, approaching Casey’s author signing table, my little palms sweaty, pointing at the bookmark in my already well-loved copy, saying with wide eyes, “I’m right here,” and picture them giving me knowing eyes right back.

Oh and when they signed my book, Casey said the name Rosamond “goes so hard.” So I’m not sayingthere will be a Rosamond in their next book, but I’m not not saying that either.

Thank you, Casey. Thank you, books. Thank you, queerness.

I want to give you a really nuanced, careful, text-based argument for why you should pre-order this book, but all I can say is it’s going to fuck shit up in the best, most gorgeous, delicious, gay way.

August 6th. Pre-Order from your local indie. Give your future self a gift.

Do one thing today that brings you pleasure. It matters.

I love you.

Love,

Rosamond