Reading: Spoiler Alert
Nov. 8th, 2020 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI've been finding it hard to read ever since the start of lockdown, and for the last couple of months it's been almost impossible to make my mind focus enough to take in the words on the page. Even much-anticipated new books by favourite authors felt like a slog, and I ended up DNFing two books in a row: one steampunky novel about lesbian space pirates, which should have been right up my street but which I just couldn't manage to get into (it was also self-published and felt like it could have done with tighter editing, which may have been part of the problem) and one chicklit novel about swimmers which I thought was going to be fluffy and feelgood but which turned out to be full of interpersonal conflict and domestic abuse). When girlyswot mentioned Olivia Dade's new romance novel, Spoiler Alert, on Twitter, I thought it sounded like fun and might just be the thing to get me out of what was starting to feel like a serious slump. And while it took me quite a long time to get through the first two-thirds of the book, this week, suddenly I found myself picking up speed again. It no longer felt as though it was an effort to push each word through the fog surrounding my brain. I didn't have to read each sentence two or three times before it made sense. I could just...read. I don't know what changed. Maybe it was not having to go into the office twice a week and being able to set aside some reading time in my lunch breaks, to keep up momentum (normally when I'm in the office I read on the bus, but I've been driving part way and then walking instead, and at lunchtimes I would rather go out for a walk rather than stay at my desk to read a book). Or maybe it's the lifting of a layer of anxiety I didn't even realise was there, as it gradually became clearer and clearer that however long counting the votes might take, Biden was going to win the US election, and Trump's key supporters were going to drop him and start looking for their 2024 candidate rather than doubling down behind his attempts to take the election by force.
Anyway, Spoiler Alert. Spoiler Alert is a contemporary m/f romance based around the fandom for a fictional TV fantasy show that has run to many seasons, leaving behind the unfinished series of books it's based on. (Any resemblance to any actual TV shows is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.) Marcus is the star of the show, but he also works through his frustrations with the showrunners' interpretation of his character by writing fix-it fic under an assumed name. April is a fan and fellow fic writer who is done with hiding her fannish identity from her coworkers. When she posts a picture of herself cosplaying Marcus's character's love interest on Twitter and goes viral, Marcus sees the picture and asks her on a date, not realising that they have already been online friends for years.
This is a funny, charming, delightful book, and is particularly entertaining for anyone with experience of fandom and fanfic communities. (I also loved the brief mentions of some of the terrible films Marcus starred in earlier in his career.) I thought Marcus was probably a bit too nice and normal-seeming to actually be a TV star, and definitely more sensitive and emotionally literate than any 40-year-old cishet white man I've ever met, but I guess that's the delightful thing about romance (or maybe I'm just jaded and cynical), and April is a wonderful and very realistic character. The novel handles both the fatphobia April experiences and Marcus's dyslexia sensitively but without ever suggesting that these aren't real challenges, and while some of the inevitable miscommunications along the path to their happy ending were so obvious I occasionally wanted to scream at the characters, Dade does manage to make them seem realistically in-character. I liked this a lot (though be warned that this novel does have quite a lot of pretty explicit sex scenes, which aren't always that easy to skim if sex scenes aren't your thing as Dade mixes in conversations which are important for plot and character development).
girlyswot mentioned Olivia Dade's new romance novel, Spoiler Alert, on Twitter, I thought it sounded like fun and might just be the thing to get me out of what was starting to feel like a serious slump. And while it took me quite a long time to get through the first two-thirds of the book, this week, suddenly I found myself picking up speed again. It no longer felt as though it was an effort to push each word through the fog surrounding my brain. I didn't have to read each sentence two or three times before it made sense. I could just...read. I don't know what changed. Maybe it was not having to go into the office twice a week and being able to set aside some reading time in my lunch breaks, to keep up momentum (normally when I'm in the office I read on the bus, but I've been driving part way and then walking instead, and at lunchtimes I would rather go out for a walk rather than stay at my desk to read a book). Or maybe it's the lifting of a layer of anxiety I didn't even realise was there, as it gradually became clearer and clearer that however long counting the votes might take, Biden was going to win the US election, and Trump's key supporters were going to drop him and start looking for their 2024 candidate rather than doubling down behind his attempts to take the election by force. Anyway, Spoiler Alert. Spoiler Alert is a contemporary m/f romance based around the fandom for a fictional TV fantasy show that has run to many seasons, leaving behind the unfinished series of books it's based on. (Any resemblance to any actual TV shows is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.) Marcus is the star of the show, but he also works through his frustrations with the showrunners' interpretation of his character by writing fix-it fic under an assumed name. April is a fan and fellow fic writer who is done with hiding her fannish identity from her coworkers. When she posts a picture of herself cosplaying Marcus's character's love interest on Twitter and goes viral, Marcus sees the picture and asks her on a date, not realising that they have already been online friends for years.
This is a funny, charming, delightful book, and is particularly entertaining for anyone with experience of fandom and fanfic communities. (I also loved the brief mentions of some of the terrible films Marcus starred in earlier in his career.) I thought Marcus was probably a bit too nice and normal-seeming to actually be a TV star, and definitely more sensitive and emotionally literate than any 40-year-old cishet white man I've ever met, but I guess that's the delightful thing about romance (or maybe I'm just jaded and cynical), and April is a wonderful and very realistic character. The novel handles both the fatphobia April experiences and Marcus's dyslexia sensitively but without ever suggesting that these aren't real challenges, and while some of the inevitable miscommunications along the path to their happy ending were so obvious I occasionally wanted to scream at the characters, Dade does manage to make them seem realistically in-character. I liked this a lot (though be warned that this novel does have quite a lot of pretty explicit sex scenes, which aren't always that easy to skim if sex scenes aren't your thing as Dade mixes in conversations which are important for plot and character development).
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Date: 2020-11-08 07:51 pm (UTC)