tl;dr: TEN THOUSAND STARS
Are you salty as fuck about how Game of Thrones ended? Have you spent time surfing the “Pegging” tag on AO3? (sorry Mom that I am talking about pegging on the internet again) Do you yearn for more fat romance heroines? Cease your peregrinations, your search is at an end! Olivia Dade is here for her you with her latest novel Spoiler Alert, which is all about a fat fanfiction-writing geologist who goes on a date with the star of the biggest fantasy show of our time (who secretly also writes fanfiction). It’s not Game of Thrones! But it’s definitely Game of Thrones! Please someone page the burn ward, as I will be delivering Benioff and Weiss to them posthaste!
I am very excited about this book but will endeavor to calmly ennumerate the reasons for my joy. A of all, I loved the representation of fanfic writers. Olivia Dade is obviously a woman with a healthy Marked for Later list on AO3 if you know what I mean,1 and it was wonderful to see not one but two protagonists for whom fandom is a joyful escape. Is it realistic? TO HELL WITH REALISTIC. I have not lived through half a year of pandemic to answer your quibbling questions about whether Oscar Isaac writes Finnpoe fanfic in his spare time (he does). April and Marcus Caster-Rupp write Aeneas/Lavinia fic for fun and I loved both that general premise and also the specific thing of the fandom believing that one specific character on the show enjoys pegging. This is the kind of fandom specificity I am here for in fiction.
Secondly, the romance was extremely lovely. Marcus and April are two people who, for vastly different reasons, have a hard time letting their guard down around new people. April has recently moved from a job that makes her miserable to one she believes will make her happy, and she’s resolved to be open about her interests, including fanfiction, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nervous about it. Marcus will, of course, risk losing all his future jobs if it comes out that he’s a fic writer, let alone one who’s been openly critical about the direction the last few seasons of his show have taken. So it’s extra great to see the characters being open and vulnerable with each other, even though you do know there is going to be a Reckoning when April eventually finds out that Marcus has an alternate identity as a close fandom friend of hers.
I also loved Dade’s depiction of one protagonist who’s fat and another who’s dyslexic. Both of them are adults who have officially figured out where they stand on weight and disability, and April in particular refuses to allow fatphobia into her life. It was great to see such a clear depiction of the fact that fatphobia and ableism are often/?always? rooted in the other person’s own issues. When April and Marcus talk about their parents’ disappointment in them, it’s clear that the parents aren’t responding to the children they have, but rather to some idea of what they wanted their own lives to be. It’s not about whether April and Marcus are happy or healthy or professionally satisfied — it’s about how they differ from what someone else, for reasons of their own, thinks they should be like.
Notably, this also means that Spoiler Alert is on the pro side when it comes to familial estrangement. I reviewed another romance novel recently that was more equivocal about the Regrets You Might Have around cutting off contact with shit family members, but Spoiler Alert comes down hard on the side of not hurting yourself by spending time with people who are supposed to love you but instead perpetually undermine you. That is my position as well! Feel free to set boundaries, beloved friends, and if your familial relationships are consistently more harmful than healing, it is a-okay to stop expending effort on them. April and Marcus know this on behalf of each other, but struggle to know it for themselves.
Furthermore, if like me you derive at least 20% of your enjoyment of romance novels from the hints that the author drops about other books in the series, you will not be disappointed in Spoiler Alert. Marcus’s co-star Alex is a loose cannon who has been assigned a minder called Lauren whom he finds very annoying OR DOES HE??? Alex also writes secret fic about his character, Cupid, getting pegged. Can’t say enough about the majesty of this character choice by Olivia Dade. I say again, TEN THOUSAND STARS, can’t wait for the sequel.
Run, do not walk, to your local book purveyor to purchase Spoiler Alert. I truly truly loved it.
Note: I received an e-ARC of Spoiler Alert from the publisher for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my review.
- Olivia Dade, if you are one of those supremely impressive humans who reads everything straight away and marks nothing for later, let’s not talk about it, because it will make me feel inadequate as a person with over 30 pages of Marked for Later fics I SAID I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. ↩