Love Is a Contact Sport, by Frederick Smith

I will confess upfront that I’m not a fan of this cover, though I’m the first to admit my tastes are, in a word, pedestrian. I requested the ARC due to name recognition and a desire to read more non-white authors. Beware: internalized homophobia/queerphobia as backstory; one of the protagonists is a struggling genre romance author; DNF review. Love Is a Contact Sport, by Frederick Smith To get this out of the way quickly, let me be unoriginal and state that all art is political, period. However, if you don’t want an author’s politics spelled out in the first chapter, this book may not be for you: there’s a conversation between Renny and his agent that reads like a summary of a lot of social media conversations on publishing, and on how both traditional publishing and a lot of readers try queer and/or non-white authors. (Badly, with an ungodly helping of discrimination.) This is my second story by the author, like One and Done, the other book by him I have read, the story is set in the…