Spoiler Alert

This romance novel was a lot of fun. I'll probably read the follow-up books, because I am a sucker for the series trope of "side characters from previous book are now main characters in next book". See also: lost paladins, apocalypse librarians, societies of gentleman.

The premise here is that well-known actor Marcus secretly writes fanfiction and is close friends and beta-reading buddies with superfan April. In the pairing they both write, she also cosplays one and he acts the other, of course. April posts cosplay pseudonomously on twitter, and Marcus asks her out on a date when she gets bullied, but neither of them know that they already know the other. Shenanigans.

I appreciate that the book at least acknowledges and has a conversation about the potentially awkward dynamic of a fan dating the actor of a character she is deeply invested in, and how to separate the person from the character. I think the detail that she changed to writing fic where the character was more from the books than from the tv show was a nice point to create some extra separation.

There's some silly chatroom, DM, and movie script interstitial snippets between chapters that I could have done without mostly. I wish they had done a little bit more character development or foreshadowing work. Most of the silly scripts felt like jokes that didn't quite fit with the rest of the tone.

Personally speaking, I appreciate that both main characters are both working out different parental issues as well as personal issues. Marcus has (emotional abusive) parents and so acts his way through life as well as his job, shielding his own vulnerabilities. April has a loving-but-fat-shaming parent who she has to negotiate boundaries with. She also is working really hard to be more open in her own life and not take shit from anybody about being fat or being a fan. It just feels like there's a lot of good personal growth to enjoy here.

My biggest hangup (as is usually the case with "why don't you just tell them X" plots) is that I am deeply uncomfortable with Marcus keeping the secret that he has a long history with April from April herself. I think Marcus slightly mitigates this by (rudely) ghosting April in his fandom guise to avoid even more lies. I also think the book's final chapters demonstrate the real fears that Marcus has about sharing this secret with April in terms of his career, buuuuuut it is also very rough to read so many pages where he is trying to pretend that he doesn't know April. I excuse this a little because this is also part of Marcus' own hangups about being himself to other people, but it's still a detail that's a lot for me personally.