Review: Spoiler Alert

I was super excited when I heard about Olivia Dade's novel Spoiler Alert. Body positive with unapologetic nerdy main characters? Sounded great! Ultimately, I enjoyed reading it but it didn't blow me away as I expected it to. Maybe my expectations were too high? I was entertained and would probably still recommend it to those who are looking for heroines who aren't typically seen in novels and those who love fanfiction and all the fun that goes along with it.

Here's the book's description:

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?

I've never gotten into fanfiction for any of the various series I enjoy but I love the idea of it. The communities that are created from an intense love of a book or show or movie or game are so wonderful. I have something a little similar with my book blogging and bookstagram community so I completely understand how it is possible to create friendships with people you only know online. I was really happy to see the fanfiction and cosplay have such a focus in this story.

I ended up listening to this one even though I had an egalley. The narration was...fine. One of my pet peeves (and I'm probably not alone in this) is when the narrator is voicing the gender opposite to their own and it just...doesn't work. That was the case with this one - the female narrator's male dialogue was not great. The rest of it though was good and the story, with my handy sudio earbuds, made for excellent background noise for walks and chores around the house.

The audiobook also made it harder to follow the parts at the end of each chapter - script excerpts, fanfic descriptions, DMs, and so on. That said, I loved the idea of them because it added an extra element and allowed the reader to get an idea of what else had been going on in the past. The audio execution just wasn't as great as I'd like.

The TV show the whole story is based around, Gods of the Gates, was very Game of Thrones-esque - an adaptation of a fantasy series where the shrowrunners had to go off book and the whole thing went kind of downhill. Sounds familiar, right? I found it entertaining to think about how the real actors would have dealt with the situations the characters found themselves in. I got into GoT late but I enjoyed the show (I'm not enough of a fantasy reader to make it through Martin's massive tomes). The similarities had me convinced that it was just Dade making up her own show because, reasons, but then there was a throwaway line at the end where the show was compared to GoT. Say what? It was so weird. 

If you think about the romance between Marcus and April too much it becomes far-fetched simply because he's a massively popular actor and she's an everyday woman. But once I got over how they met and so on, their relationship is major goals. There's sexual attraction, of course, but there is such respect and that is incredibly attractive. They're both so smart and passionate and they brought out the best in each other. You couldn't help but root for them to have the most perfect Happily Ever After.

You can probably tell I was just feeling OK about Spoiler Alert. I'm so glad Olivia Dade's book exists but it didn't hit the high notes for me. It's still worth a read but don't rush out and buy a copy for yourselves - use the library for this one. And all that said? I'm also likely still going to check out Dade's other novels too!

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the publisher, HarperCollins Canada, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own*