Shhh, don’t tell the other ~600,000 people in my baseball-obsessed city… but I don’t actually like baseball in real life! I love reading sports romances, however: all that drive and determination and top-notch physical fitness makes for some hot heroes, and those overblown egos are the perfect setup for being hilariously shot down by the heroine. I love it when the hero can’t figure out why his intended lady love isn’t impressed with his fame and fortune and tripping over herself to date him, like every other woman he’s ever encountered. And boy, can those elite athletes pull out all the stops in a big way!
Tracy March’s THE PRACTICE PROPOSAL is a lighthearted romp through three quintessential romance tropes: the sports romance, the (pseudo)-reunion romance, and the fake relationship. The fake relationship setup can be very hit-or-miss for me: it’s rife with great emotional conflict, but it can easily cross the line into excessive angst or be unrealistic and ho-hum. In this case, it’s just so much fun and the characters are so enjoyable that it works, even if the time frame from pretending to true love is incredibly short. Womanizing bad-boy-off-the-pitch first baseman Cole Collins is up for contract negotiations and needs to give the impression that he’s giving up his wild ways and is ready to settle down. All-around good-girl Liza Sutherland needs to meet her fundraising goal or she’ll be ousted from her job organizing baseball camps for disadvantaged youths. The perfect solution (engineered by Cole’s agent, Frank)? A fake relationship on both sides, without the other party knowing about the arrangement. Both believe they have valid reasons for entering into the fake relationship and neither expects it to turn into anything more—but that’s exactly what happens almost from the get-go. One date with Liza is enough for Cole to realize that she’s everything he never thought he wanted. Spending time with her former teenage crush makes Liza feel things she never thought she’d feel again after the death of her fiancé.
Their courtship is ridiculously sweet and fun (he plays for the Washington Nationals, she’s the daughter of the owners of the Baltimore Orioles—divided sports loyalties are always a source of great fun!), there’s no drama until the end (and a ‘big reveal’ about Cole that had me rolling my eyes), there’s nary a plot, and all love scenes occur behind closed doors, but what makes the book work so well is the characters. Cole initially comes across as your typical sports hero: successful, cocky, a little wild, and with a long line of casual hookups with actresses and Victoria’s Secret models. But while he’s confident, he’s not a jerk, his success has come after many years of struggling with self-worth despite innate athletic skill, and his wild ways are his way of not dealing with abandonment issues from his youth. Once he reconnects with Liza, the only person who’s always seen him for who he truly is since he was an eighteen-year-old nobody, we start to see the swoon-worthy hero he can be. He’s incredibly sweet and adorable, and watching him strive to impress her with their dates and get her to notice him like an eager puppy is ridiculously cute and will leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside and wishing you had a Cole of your own. Those tweets? That scene at the cemetery? The seventh-inning stretch in Game 7 of the World Series? Be still my heart! He’s such a likeable character that watching him overcome his issues and fall in love is incredibly enjoyable.
Liza is a great character as well. The wholesome, formerly-awkward-but-now-gorgeous-goody-two-shoes heroine can be hard to pull off because she can come across as too perfect—and as a woman reading romance, I prefer a too-perfect hero to a too-perfect heroine. But Tracy March does wholesome goodness well with Liza, balancing the girl-next-door appeal with the right amount of angst to give her character depth. Having lost her fiancé to violence, Liza has spent the past two years in a ‘comfort zone’ of grief, family, and baseball that has kept her from experiencing any real feelings. Her growing attraction to Cole makes her struggle with the overwhelming guilt of feeling things for another man and hesitate to take a chance on the relationship, and watching the two of them work to resolve that is really heartwarming. She’s also fun, independent, incredibly knowledgeable about baseball, and has always seen Cole for the man he is rather than a superstar athlete, which makes her so relatable that you can’t help but like her and root for the two of them.
If you like your romance of the short, super-sweet, ultra-tame, and lighthearted persuasion with a hot sports hero, THE PRACTICE PROPOSAL is the perfect quick read for you.
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Award-winning author Tracy March writes romantic thrillers, and lighthearted romances inspired by her real-life happily ever after.
