It’s really hard to find good books about queer women that aren’t YA or end with someone dying. It’s even harder to find good f/f romance in a sea of porn that seems intended more for straight men. So a lesbian romance being published by a mainstream house—and in hardcover, no less!—caught my attention.

When Katie Met Cassidy reminds me of the chick lit that I read in high school. Lots of wealthy people doing glamorous things in New York City, thoroughly unrelatable but fun. The kind of book you fall into for a short time and then move on from.

That’s really all I wanted from this book, and I got it, but I also got a lot of stuff that I could do without. Katie’s reactions to Cassidy’s lifestyle are cruelly overblown: Noting that some of the lesbians at the girl bar “look like women” (you don’t say??) and feeling nauseated when she realizes that Cassidy wears boxer briefs. Katie has so much (internalized?) homophobia that it took me out of the story. I love bickering and enemies-to-lovers! But I’m not as thrilled about a girl I’m supposed to root for being an ass to the butch girl who loves her!

I also found the lack of sex scenes unusual. This is a romance, but every time our heroines are in the bedroom, the scene fades to black. That’s hardly industry standard, and if this were a book about a straight couple, there would have been explicit sex. The lack of sex here made it seem like the book was trying not to offend anyone, which makes me wonder about the intended audience. Straight women?

Even with its flaws, I enjoyed reading When Katie Met Cassidy. It’s funny, it has moments of real romance, and no one dies. But I think that queer readers owe it to ourselves not to grade books on a curve just because there are queer characters. This is like the bare minimum of what a mainstream f/f romance should be, but it could be so much better than it is.