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A Normal-Length Retrospective on Olivia Dade's "Spoiler Alert" (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-27 10:46:24
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Comments

BJC

A genuinely fascinating dissection of a book that sounds so interestingly terrible I'm highly tempted to read it now. It's such an interesting point that it's only the women - who are the viewpoint characters - get to be fat. (I've barely read any romance novels but I'm extremely willing to bet that it's the same for those tentative steps that the genre seems to be taking towards tackling disability.) There's room in the fantasy to *be loved* if you don't fit a perfect societal gender mold but there doesn't seem to be any room to love people who don't, and that honestly feels more regressive than just having everyone be able bodied straight hot models. Also, 10/10 digression about wanting to gnaw on lee paces knees out of sheer lust. That should be in more book reviews.

Ro Ivan

wowza..... sometimes people just write stuff, huh?

Kai

I read this this morningish and I can't stop thinking about how deceptive Not-Nikolaj Coster-Waldeur was with him just never telling April (? I've already forgotten their names djdjsjc) about him secretly having been her fandom bestie and planning to never tell her because he's basically doing the fandom equivalent of an undercover going native oh my god so many boundaries were violated there. And yet they still got back together again??? Like Olivia Dade didn't realise just how deceptive Not-Nikolaj was??? Like it was a speed bump they had to get over and not Mount fucking Gongga???? And it reminds me of some post I saw a while back that started with a TikTok of online stalking, and someone had reblogged with a story about how one time they'd read a "kinda creepy" reply to a Facebook post and had subsequently trawled through all of his social media until they found fetishih art he'd drawn on a site that was clearly meant to be private, and then just replied to his comment with it and basically forever linked it to his everyday identity. And they were like haha he got do angry with me. And no one had responded to that reblog to you know, at the very least be like "hey, that's called online stalking and it's almost doxxing, don't do it" And for the rest of the day I couldn't stop thinking about it because it's like bro, they're not gonna make you prisoner of the month at the panopticon, what the fuck are you doing? And it's one of those things that drives me crazy because I'm like am I the one who's overreacting? When I know I'm not. If someone has put that boundary there, fucking respect it. So many books nowadays have moments where characters basically turn to the camera and break the fourth wall to be like "I am a full grown adult who is consenting to this sex act, I am not being pressured and I'm not intoxicated, I am consenting, consent is sexy," and yet the text in the book itself clearly shows a surface level understanding of consent and boundaries. Consent isn't just important when you're doing the fucking, go watch the Thames valley police's consent and tea video and maybe you'll understand that Olivia.

Wendi Evergreen

Does April ever seem interested in...rocks? Erosion? Aquifers? Literally anything related to geology? It sounds like Marcus has at least one too many things going on. If he did, let's say, stunts or lighting on the show instead of playing the lead. Or he'd read her fanfic but hadn't interacted with her personally. Or he wasn't pretending to be dumb. Or she found out about his double-life before they got together. Or his parents weren't A Series of Unfortunate Events level evil. As a bottom heavy midsize/small fat woman with a boyfriend who's over a foot taller than me the current body type/size difference trends in romance novels feels very weird. Like, I 'should' find it relatable, but it's so idealized I get wigged out

Makenzie M.
>>136408502

April is introduced in a field digging up dirt for Reasons, and she gets pretty excited about an earthquake simulation at a museum on her second date with Marcus (too excited, they get mad horny in there), and I think at one point she gifts him a rock? But for the most part the important thing about her being a geologist is that she likes Looking Below The Surface; it's a trait that's there for metaphorical resonance much more than anything else. Marcus is definitely overcrowded as a character; I think you're right that stripping down his role on the show (and by extension his need to have a dumb public persona) would help a lot, as would trimming his absurdly evil parents. The plot is too busy in a lot of ways, to the effect of the book feeling very suffocating while also remarkably empty. The short fat woman/tall jacked guy trend icks me for many reasons, not least of all because it definitely seems like it's supposed to come across as wildly aspirational for the perceived fat woman reader? Obviously almost all m/f romance comes with an improbably idealized male love interest, but in books with fat heroines (including this one) you also get the heroine swooning when her boyfriend does completely normal things like touch her rolls during sex. The bar really is in hell.

Makenzie M.
>>136404558

cannot overstate enough that the tiktok incident you're describing is 1000 times wilder than anything that happened in this book, good lord

Ronnie

Beginning with a recap of matched put me in the exact correct headspace to read the rest of this.

Peyton Palmour

This is crazy because I read about half of this book in October of 2020, and then had a complete breakdown and could not finish it. I had just come out of the GoT fandom and am an enduring classics fan, and so I was really interested in all the references early on. But, as a very fat woman...I also found some of the ways the fatness was written strange and sometimes really uncomfortable. I remember getting to the "go to the gym" scene and thinking is was kind of weird. The ending of that book sounds wild. Though all the talk of actors who played characters and the smut written about them reminds me of a time I went to a fanfiction after dark panel, and one of the people was talking about how she wrote a lot of Buffy smut fic back in the day talked about how when she met James Marsters she kept thinking about all the smut she'd written about Spike. And I normally find that strange, because I so rarely think of the characters and actors as interchangeable that way. But I guess this person and Olivia Dade really really do.

AuggieTea

I really enjoyed this whole report. And now i never need read the book at all, because this thoroughly extinguished any desire to. Consistently witty and thought provoking and I loved the meta-analysis of Dade's use of the fat woman/buff man trope and what that means in a larger context. Couldn't ask for more. Happy subscriber here.

Makenzie M.
>>136434602

this is SUCH kind feedback, thank you so much :) I appreciate you taking the time to comment <3

faith noel

I saw you talking about this on tumblr and I came straight here and paid to read this because I read half this book when it came out and have had it bothering me like a rock in my shoe ever since. Finally, someone who dislikes this thing correctly. How can an author get the fandom experience so fascinatingly close to correct-but-wrong. Beta reader/writer is a perfect setup for romance and this just squanders the concept immediately. Why do they just move in together. Why is everyone lying. WHAT is with the weird therapy-speak about ADHD and dyslexia. And I am not gonna lie, the fact that the MC was a modern-AU writer for her show of choice similarly made me go, okay we wouldn't get each other. THANK YOU, maybe at last I can stop ruminating over this one.

Haiz

apologies for commenting on an older review, but what a deeply fascinating book to study like a bug. something that stood out to me based on this review alone that hasn't been dissected is april's fear of coming out as fat to a fanfic writer community... like, ok, fatphobia is real, worrying about it is super reasonable, but there are So Many fat women in fanfic writer spaces, right??? like this probably pertains to the way she seems to have no friends in fandom (ABSURD. i did actually spend time on an old school forum as a main fandom space and it's impossible to be active in an isolated space like that without considering people on it basically family after like 1 year), but it seems so out of touch to worry about opening up to this particular community and then going straight to posting cosplay pics on *twitter*.

Makenzie M.
>>163503121

don't apologize for that, it's great to see people enjoying the backlog! and yeah, April's fandom interactions are... strange. the whole time I was reading the book, I couldn't help but think that for all that Olivia Dade seemed to have strong opinion about GoT, she seemed weirdly unfamiliar with how fandom actually tends to function.

Maxwell Heath

I am compelled to comment on this one because my romance book club read All The Feels and we still like to make fun of it from time to time. My personal “favorite” thing is the pegging issue you mention: the book is obsessed with the male lead writing fanfic about his character getting pegged and making jokes about pegging. Does any pegging actually happen in the real life narrative of the book? No. Also he refers to the female lead as a bird constantly for…some reason.