“Chasing Headlines” by J. Rose Black (2 stars)

*I received an e-book copy of this book from Hidden Gems Books in exchange for review.*

Amazon markets Chasing Headlines as “A steamy, new adult, enemies to lovers comedy series” (Amazon.com), but it wasn’t steamy (they had dreams about each other, but hadn’t even agreed to date by the end of the book). New adult just means that it can’t be too steamy because it’s being marketed for a younger audience and as for comedy, I didn’t laugh once. The only thing being correctly marketed is that it’s an enemies-to-lovers (who aren’t yet actually lovers) romance. I felt disappointed in what I had built this book into based on that marketing, but it barely met the minimum I would’ve expected for this tagline.

Beyond that, I’m not even really sure what I was supposed to be focusing on sometimes. I get that the first book in a new series needs to do a lot of world-building, so there’s a lot of introducing characters, setting up the scenery, and showing the rules of the creation. But the amount of times “No baseball for Olivia” was repeated started to drive me up a wall. Once you’ve introduced this storyline, you can expect the reader to remember it for at least the next couple hundred pages. Repeating it every twenty is just overkill. Then there were the side characters; why did Olivia’s roommate get a boyfriend faster than the main character? That makes no sense that side characters have more of a storyline than the main characters. I don’t quite know why that bothers me so much, but I guess it’s because I held out so much hope for a cute baseball romance, but I didn’t even get to see the one romance that bloomed during this book. But I digress.

As for the positives of this book, the witty banter between Olivia and Breslin was one of the few things I enjoyed. They really played up the enemies bit, so much that at times it seemed they forgot the lovers part. The book also excelled at the baseball scenes, so if you enjoy books that have authentic sports scenes, you might be willing to try this one. The characters were well-flushed out, but the amount of side characters at times felt like they were taking away time that could’ve been better spent flushing out the relationship between Olivia and Breslin.

I will admit that the book does a great job of portraying mental health in men’s sports. Whenever the point of view shifted to Breslin’s internal monologues about his mental wellbeing I found myself suddenly engaged. Learning about how his past trauma was affecting his ball-playing and his emotional growth (with Olivia, his teammates, and himself) was inspiring. I won’t pretend that I actually know what any of that feels like, but seeing it from Breslin’s point of view instead of as complaints from those around him made it feel lifelike. Olivia wasn’t the only one to point out to him how he was acting, but she seemed to be the only one he cared about listening to for a vast majority of the book.

I’ll admit that maybe I missed something that other readers were seeing, since it has a 4.3-star rating on Goodreads or maybe I’ve just been reading too many (actually) steamy romances for this one to entice me. Whatever the case, I couldn’t bring myself to rate this one any higher than two stars. Realistically, I almost didn’t finish this one. Only reason I did is because I wanted to see if they would ever actually get together. And apparently they won’t until book two, which I don’t really care enough to read when it becomes available.