Review: Spoiler Alert – Olivia Dade

Review: Spoiler Alert – Olivia DadeSpoiler Alert
by Olivia Dade
Series: Spoiler Alert #1
Publisher: Avon
Publication Date: October 6, 2020
Genres: Romance
Pages: 416
Source: Library

My rating: One StarOne StarOne StarOne StarOne Star


Olivia Dade bursts onto the scene in this delightfully fun romantic comedy set in the world of fanfiction, in which a devoted fan goes on an unexpected date with her celebrity crush, who’s secretly posting fanfiction of his own. 

Marcus Caster-Rupp has a secret. While the world knows him as Aeneas, the star of the biggest show on TV, Gods of the Gates, he's known to fanfiction readers as Book!AeneasWouldNever, an anonymous and popular poster.  Marcus is able to get out his own frustrations with his character through his stories, especially the ones that feature the internet’s favorite couple to ship, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone ever found out about his online persona, he’d be fired. Immediately.

April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s hidden her fanfiction and cosplay hobby from her “real life” for years—but not anymore. When she decides to post her latest Lavinia creation on Twitter, her photo goes viral. Trolls and supporters alike are commenting on her plus-size take, but when Marcus, one half of her OTP, sees her pic and asks her out on a date to spite her critics, she realizes life is really stranger than fanfiction.

Even though their first date is a disaster, Marcus quickly realizes that he wants much more from April than a one-time publicity stunt. And when he discovers she’s actually Unapologetic Lavinia Stan, his closest fandom friend, he has one more huge secret to hide from her.

With love and Marcus’s career on the line, can the two of them stop hiding once and for all, or will a match made in fandom end up prematurely cancelled?

Amazon  Apple  Barnes & Noble  Kobo  Indiebound  Bookshop
Goodreads

5 stars icon contemporary icon m/f romance icon



First off, wow, that cover. A book featuring a clinch with a beautiful plus-sized heroine? Epically gorgeous. This is a masterwork of outgrowing toxic family, of being your true self, and a love letter to fandom. I absolutely adored it.

April is simply one of my favorite heroines ever. One thing I love about Olivia Dade’s work is how well she writes fat characters. Sure, there is some fatphobia in the book from other characters, but April herself loves herself and her body, and pushes back against those comments (including one particularly memorable scene). But what you really need to know about April is that she’s a humongous geology nerd and a prolific fanfic writer, specifically for the Aeneas/Lavinia pairing from Gods of the Gates, a wildly popular fantasy TV show based on a book series. Her best friend in the world, in fact, is a fellow fanfic writer and critique partner, someone who she’s only ever chatted with online but someone she’s shared so much with. Unbeknownst to her, however, her fanfic partner is Marcus, the actor who actually plays Aeneas on the show. And she can’t ever know, unfortunately, because if anyone ever found out about Marcus’s extremely critical of the show fanfic, his career would be over. So when a series of (extremely nerdy, extremely sweet) events leads to Marcus going on a date with a fan, and when he realizes that fan is his online best friend… well, he’s in a bind. Especially when he finds that she’s just as smart, funny and sweet in person as she is online, and he can’t be his true self with her.

“Smart, accomplished, passionate women were his undoing, always, even though he knew—he knew—he’d never be enough for them. Not the fake him, and not the real him, either.”

In public, it’s easier for Marcus to pretend to be vacuous and vain. Marcus is dyslexic. This caused endless problems for him growing up as the child of two professors, who were generally perplexed how two such intelligent people raised, well, him. No matter how hard he tried, he was still a failure to his parents, so eventually he just gave up and assumed his himbo personality: vain, friendly, but not very bright. The thing that made him finally enjoy reading? Fanfic about his show, especially his character, something where he was the expert. Writing fanfic, and the community he found through that, has been a lifesaver for him, especially given how awful the past season’s scripts have been. But spending time with April is even better, and their relationship was amazing for me, too. Their chemistry, their banter, even their rights really struck a chord for me.

“Millions of people could recognize him under the blinding lights of a red carpet. But if she touched him like this long enough, maybe she’d be able to recognize him even in the darkness, by feel alone, in a way that made him uniquely hers.”

While the source of the bleak moment is at its heart a communications issue, it’s also absolutely heartbreaking and imminently understandable. Marcus is so afraid of showing his true self, so terrified that he’ll lose April, that I had a hard time holding his big secret against him. And besides that secret, they’re honestly quite good at communicating with each other, especially when Marcus unknowingly runs into things that hurt April. They are both dealing with a ton of toxic family baggage from families that consider them “less than” and in need of fixing, and one of my absolute favorite parts of the book is April being so supportive of Marcus when dealing with his family, affirming that he doesn’t owe them forgiveness just because they’re his parents. I may have gotten a bit teary-eyed, honestly. Luckily, the chapters are interspersed with bits of fanfic, Marcus’s past movie scripts, and other bits of hilarity.

“As we’re both aware—all too aware—some scriptwriters believe death and misery and stagnation are more clever, more meaningful, and more authentic to reality than love and happiness and change. But life isn’t all misery, and finding a path through hard, hard lives to joy is tough, clever, meaningful work.”

Oh hey, yeah, let’s just throw in a blistering defense of the entire romance genre in the epilogue, shall we? Overall, this book brought all the feels, and it’s definitely going straight to my comfort read shelf. Highly recommended!

Content notes: View Spoiler »

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.