I guess I have to read all of Cat Sebastian's work now.

In my experience, romance books are often either shockingly bad or, at best, mediocre. The writing is often too direct, too much telling instead of showing. The dialogue tends to be cringe and unrealistic. Characters are often more of caricatures, made up off tropes and chlichés, and the plot, if there is one, usually bores me.

You Should Be So Lucky is nothing like that. The writing is really good. The characters are realistic, nuanced and likeable. The plot is not only interesting and satisfying but also a really well constructed analogy for the romance plot. I love how hopeful Sebastian's work feels, despite the tome and contexts they are set in. She somehow manages to perfectly balance the emotional toll of the period-typical homophobia without falling into the cliché genre of The Tragic Queers.

I really love her work and probably will pick up more by her.

I aim to be as unimpressed as Keiko when it comes to listening to misogynistic men.

Unfortunately, this didn't really work for me, which surprised me. From what I'd heard, this had everything I like in a book: sci-fi, a sapphic love story and beautiful writing. And the writing really is beautiful and the plot interesting enough. But the characters - Red and Blue - and the relationship between them fell completely flat for me. I could not get myself to care about them. I think the issue for me was that this book is not at all concerned with fleshing its characters out, which I find extremely important. How to Lose the Time War is a very short book, which gives the reader barely any time to get to know the characters, while also being very lyrical, meaning that even more character building is sacrificed for beautiful prose. On top of that, the story mainly consists of love letters, which creates even more distance to the characters. All that combined made the characters feel like ideas, like the first draft to me.

Fredrik Backman is a master at balancing humor and heavy topics.