I wanted to love this book but I just could not force myself to finish it.
The basic premise sounds like something I would love. An actor from a populI wanted to love this book but I just could not force myself to finish it.
The basic premise sounds like something I would love. An actor from a popular tv show falling in love with a fan and they both write fan fiction and it has plus size rep? Sounds amazing, right? The premise is. Unfourtnatly, I don’t think the author has enough skill to pull it off.
Right from the start I was thrown off by the writing - I was expecting fast paced writing and a fun, fluffy romcom that pulls me in immediately but the writing was so rough and heavy handed. There was a lot of info-dumping in a weird way, in that the author just rambled on about the things that trouble the characters and their inner conflicts instead of revealing them in a more natural way. There was also just a lot of needless sentences — you don’t have to say every time a character takes a shower! Even with the rough beginning, I had hope that once the main characters met there would be enough chemistry to make me care about them but alas. This was not the case. I found their initial meeting to have absolutely no chemistry and can't imagine how that kind of date would make them want to spend more time with each other.
I love fanfiction. I love romcoms. I watched Game of Thrones and was a Braime shipper. I was expecting to love this book but honestly, it’s just not well written. I wasn’t expecting the GoT-ness to be so obvious and heavy-handed - the author didn’t make any kind of attempt to differentiate this from its obvious inspiration which just made it feel less like a novel about fanfiction and more like just straight up fanfiction. Badly written fanfiction at that. And rather than feeling clever, all the callbacks to what happened with the last season of GoT (how awful the show runners are, the leaked scripts that were so bad most people assumed they were fake, and so on) just felt weird and made me roll my eyes. I lived through the GoT drama, I didn’t need an over-exaggerated play by play of it. I realize, of course, that some people who read this book won’t have much knowledge of the GoT drama but I’m not sure if that’s better or worse, you’ll have to let me know.
And then there was the weirdness that I wasn’t expecting but maybe should’ve been where it’s not really GoT fanfic but RPF (real person fan fiction) about one of the actors from GoT falling for a fan. Which okay, some people love RPF but it just feels very… gross in this book. You have your main character/love interest (Marcus) who is not only based off of a real life person but is written in a way that makes him look like a petulant idiot man-child who is far too obsessed with the show he’s on. And that just rubbed me the wrong way. I can understand how some people (usually teenagers) have that fantasy that their favorite actor writes fanfic just like them but in reality, it’s just weird on so many levels. This character (who is 40 years old) is so obsessed with the show he’s on that when he’s not acting on it, he’s writing fan fiction and talking to other fan fiction writers about it… I’m absolutely not hating on fanfic, I actively read it, I’ve written it, but it just comes off as very unhealthy honestly, I wanted to tell Marcus to just freaking move on with his life already. I wouldn’t have liked Marcus even if I didn’t know the context and understand the inspiration for him because the author tried too hard to make him perfect and he just felt unreal and annoying, the fact that I did know the inspiration just made it feel wrong.
Speaking of being heavy-handed. There is no finesse to be found in the writing of this book. The author had some interesting themes and ideas she tried to play with and explore but there was no nuance to it. I liked the idea of what she was doing with exploring body positivity, fandom culture and how people are shamed for it, but I don’t think it was handled well. Instead of being shown how April is shamed for her size or has to hide her fandom love, we’re just told in the beginning of the book that she’s tired of making herself smaller for other people so she’s done with it. Love that message so much but it wasn’t executed well. Which is how I felt about most of the book (at least the half I read).
The characters “problems” just didn’t feel real or well written. Marcus’ reasons for acting like he’s far less smart than he is, makes no sense and his constant inner tormoil over whether or not to start acting like he’s actually intelligent was just annoying. I like that the author included a character with dyslexia but this added plot point of him pretending to be less smart than he is and like he’s nothing but a pretty face was just weird and didn’t make sense. And again, when taking into account the fact that Marcus is very obviously inspired by a REAL PERSON, the whole thing with him acting unintelligent just felt gross. Are you saying the real life person you based him on, comes off as unintelligent? Not cool.
Likewise with April, I guess I just didn’t understand why she couldn’t just tell people she liked the show? I understand writing fanfic can still be taboo and a lot of people don’t understand it even as it’s becoming more mainstream, but the show in this book is as big as GoT was in real life. I can’t imagine a bunch of geologists judging April for being obsessed with the show nor that she was the only geologist that was. Loved the body positivity of it all (I do relate to her fears of revealing herself to her fandom friends and really liked that aspect of her coming to accept herself) but again, I think a more talented writer could’ve pulled it off better. The basic message was “fat people can be sexy and desired” which is great and I’m sure, obviously, it found it's audience, but it was a miss for me.
It also bugged me on a deep level how April assumed Marcus was just an unintelligent hot actor because that's how he comes off in interviews and that because of this there was nothing about him worth getting to know until she realized he was smarter than he pretended to be in interviews. I think I understand what the author was trying to do here but it just didn’t come across right and I don’t think it was handled well. I get Marcus has this persona of the unintelligent but hot playboy actor but for someone for whom body positivity and not judging someone by their looks is so important to, April is really hard to like for the way she thinks about Marcus before realizing oh it’s okay he’s secretly super smart!! Her inner monologue for the whole of their first date is just about how unintelligent and boring he is until he slips a few big words into conversation and she realizes he's secretly smart and suddenly he's interesting. It would be one thing if he'd acted like an asshole before that or something but literally it was just because he pretended to be less smart but was still really a nice person and a great actor who was trying to be nice and taking her out to (a very expensive) dinner because his fans were being assholes to her. But because he wasn't nearly as smart as April, there was no point to even giving the dude a chance. And I clearly just really did not like that. I thought it was a horrible message.
The short and sweet: This book is very obviously self insert wishfullfilment - which I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that! Write what you want to write! The problem for me came in where it felt very amatuarisih and unpolished and that the author seemingly didn’t do any work to try and distance this book from it’s inspiration which I found lazy and embarrassing.
In theory, I think this book had a great premise. In reality though I think it should’ve stayed as badly written GoT celebrity/self insert fanfiction....more
