A Sapphic Romance For COVID-Conscious Queers

Rachel Lacey's "The View from the Top" is the first novel I've ever read that actually acknowledges COVID.

My wife calls herself "the grumpy half of a grumpy/sunshine marriage," which always makes me chuckle, both because it's true and because, when we first started dating, she would never have referred to herself with a fan fiction tag. I softened her up; that's what sunshines do! When I met Stacy, her Twitter bio said, "matchbook seeks maniac," but what she got was Smokey the Soft Butch Bear: a cozy, contained campfire for all her flame-based feelings. Oh, we're other tags too: fluff, friendship/love, found family, LGBTQ themes, mutual pining. (Although, to be honest, those last two tags are pretty much the same thing.) 

I love queer love. I love reading about queer love, especially. Maybe because there was no such thing as queer romance novels when I was growing up, or even for most of the time I've been a grown-up. For so long, our stories — if they existed at all — have been tragedy on tragedy. Pushed off roofs, mowed down by cars, stray bullets, deadly diseases, alien attacks, werewolf bites, cis men, getting gunned down on a lesbian wedding days. So there's something extra special about the familiar beats I can now rely on from queer romance. Familiar in the wide world of tropes and storytelling, and also familiar in my own personal world where I'm always seeking and sinking into soft things. 

I want to be delighted by queer romance, charmed, enchanted, swept away. And I am, almost always! But I sometimes feel really bummed out because one of the main ways my wife and friends and family care for me is a way I've never seen on TV or in a movie or read about in any book. One of the deepest kinds of love I experience is other people masking to keep me safe. COVID wrecked my life in 2020 and I absolutely cannot get it again. The people who love me best know that and go to great lengths, at great personal inconvenience, to help me not get sick. Nothing — nothing! — makes me feel more cherished than others masking up.

Even stories written in the last few years don't seem to exist in the world of COVID — or, I don't know, maybe they do and none of the characters are talking about it or protecting anyone from it? Maybe it's like real life in that way? So, imagine my surprise as I was in raptures, kicking my feet and squealing like a 1950s cartoon housewife, swooning over Rachel Lacey's new queer indie romance novel, The View from the Top, when COVID appeared. 

But wait — let me set the stage! 

Emily Janssen is an artist working part-time at her grandmothers' very gay inn in Crescent Falls, Vermont. Grandmothers. As in two. Because it's Rachel Lacey and everyone is queer. Emily Janssen is kind of fizzling out. She's 35. She's never really been anywhere, hasn't experienced much of what the world has to offer, can't even make it to the top of the mountain everyone else in her hiking club has summited. Probably it has something to do with being abandoned by her mom, but she's too busy painting and wandering around in the forest and Not Thinking About That to really solve the traumatic mystery. 

Diana Devlin is, as her alliterative name suggests, a boss. In fact, she's almost the tip-top boss at her family's giant hotel chain — and, really, all she needs to do to get that CEO position is acquire this little gay inn nestled in the mountains of Crescent Falls, Vermont. She runs the boutique arm of Devlin Hotels. While she's in town to speak to this pair of lesbian grandmas about buying their inn, she decides to go for a hike. The front desk guy tells her to maybe not try the highest summit in town, but she refuses to listen to him because she's Diana Damn Devlin and she's in charge of everything, including her own body, and if she tells her legs to take her up a mountain, they're going to take her up a mountain! 

Emily and Diana meet when Dianna gets super duper lost trying to climb the mountain she was warned away from, tumbling down a hilly thicket, almost directly into a painting Emily's working on. One (1) woodland rescue leads to one (1) dinner leads to One (1) Night to Forever. 

Rachel Lacey is one of my favorite sapphic writers. I've read her previous two books, Stars Collide and Cover Story, at least five times each. It's the pining and the humor, for sure, but I also love how Lacey applies pressure to her queer couples both internally and externally. I love that they have to defeat some things as a team, and some things on their own because they're working through their own traumas and histories and hang-ups and anxieties. I love that both women always grow together, but also grow as individuals. The View from the Top is classic Lacey in that way: Diana and Emily both have big time issues with their parents that inform the way they think about chasing their dreams; they both have struggled with relationships in the past; and they're both stuck, despite knowing what they really want to do with their lives. 

What's not a question is how bonkers their chemistry is. It's hard to work together when you know how well you work together, you know? 

Good ol' tropey deliciousness, and get this: When Dianna is back in New York City, leaving work, she puts on a face mask "because if the pandemic had taught her anything, it was that public transportation was germy as hell." And when Dianna is back in Vermont, and she gets sick, Emily arrives to take care of her and… puts on a face mask! Which she simply has with her! In fact, she says it would be "nonsense" not to have one! She even "rummages around her pantry and comes up with the box of COVID tests she always keeps handy." 

And the story just keeps on developing around them! In a world where COVID really exists and people take precautions to protect themselves and others! 

Maybe that doesn't matter to everyone, but to someone whose life is dominated by the fallout from one COVID infection over four years ago, it sure does matter to me. It sure does make me feel seen. I highlighted the passages about masking so I could come back to them whenever I'm feeling down and invisible, living like I do with Long COVID. Stuck inside so much of the time because so many people still don't get it, or just don't care. 

Rachel Lacey has the gift of writing romance, absolutely, but even more impressively, she has the gift of understanding what Maya Angelou calls "the life-giving power of literature," the clear belief that the greatest thing a writer can do is help their readers really see themselves and their struggles out in the wide world. Even the sunshine half of a grumpy/sunshine marriage needs a little help with hope sometimes.