When Katie Met Cassidy
by Camille Perri
Contemporary Romance
262 pages
Releases June 19, 2018

This was one of my Book of the Month picks this month, so I got it a little early. It’s a very quick read, and a sweet story. Basically, it’s lesbian romance fluff. We need more fluff with non-heterosexual romances, so this is great stuff!

The book touches on gender issues – Cassidy is a woman, and seems happy to be so, but abhors feminine clothing and instead dresses solely in men’s suits. (The scene with her fabulously gay tailor was an absolute delight!) She flashes back a little onto her childhood when she wasn’t allowed to wear the clothing she felt best in. She also has a few conversations with Katie about gender roles. Katie is much more traditionally feminine, wearing dresses and heels and long hair.

I’m a little torn on whether I dislike the use of the trope “straight woman turned gay after breakup” or like the point that Katie isn’t sure she likes women, but she knows she likes Cassidy. Cassidy’s gender is secondary to her personality. And it’s not like Katie decided to go hit on women after her fiance cheated on her; she got practically dragged to the lesbian bar by Cassidy, who saw how much she was hurting and decided to help her.

I enjoyed seeing that Cassidy has casual sex partners, many of them former sex partners, who are still good friends with her. Granted, she has lots of one-night stands who are upset with her since she’s quite the player, but there are several women who she’s been involved with before the book opens, who are close friends of hers and care about her future. I wish we saw more relationships like this in heterosexual romantic fiction instead of only in GLBT fiction! These kinds of relationships do exist in heterosexual groups, but it seems like romantic fiction is always divided between “heterosexual monogamy” and “everything else.” I did read an exception in Next Year, For Sure, but I greatly disliked the ending.

I really loved this book. It was sweet, and light-hearted, and a pleasant breath of fresh air from a lot of what I’ve been reading recently!

You can find a list of all of my Pride Month reads here.

From the cover of When Katie Met Cassidy:

When it comes to Cassidy, Katie can’t think straight.

Katie Daniels, a twenty-eight-year-old Kentucky transplant with a strong set of traditional values, has just been dumped by her fiance when she finds herself seated across a negotiating table from native New Yorker Cassidy Price, a sexy, self-assured woman wearing a man’s suit. While at first Katie doesn’t know what to think, a chance meeting on a West Village street later that night leads them both to the Metropolis, a dimly lit lesbian dive bar that serves as Cassidy’s second home.

The night offers straightlaced Katie a glimpse into a wild yet fiercely tight-knit community, one in which barrooms may as well be bedrooms, and loyal friends fill in the spaces absent families leave behind. And in Katie, Cassidy finds a chance to open her heart in new ways. Soon their undeniable connection will bring into question everything each of them thought they knew about sex and love.

From the acclaimed author of The Assistants comes another gutsy book about the importance of women taking the reins – this time, when it comes to love, sex, and self-acceptance. Written with Camille Perri’s signature wry writ and charm, When Katie Met Cassidy is a fun, fast-paced romantic comedy about gender and sexuality, and the importance of figuring out who we are in order to go after what we truly want.