The guy playing Aeneas had tweeted to her. Followed her.
And ... he appeared to have asked her out. On a date.
"I read a fic like this once," she whispered. [loc. 438]
Marcus Caster-Rupp is the star of a TV show called 'Gods of the Gates', very loosely based on the Aeneid. He works hard on his role, physically and mentally, but has cultivated a friendly-but-dim persona, in part so that he won't have to discuss the failings of the script. (The show is based on a series of novels: the show writers ran out of source material and ... did not maintain quality.) April Whittier is a successful geologist, who conceals her fandom activities from her colleagues for fear of appearing unprofessional. Book!AeneasWouldNever is a fanfic writer, who betas for fellow ficcer UnapologeticLaviniaStan: their online friendship is vitally important to both of them, but they have never met in real life.
When Marcus-the-actor invites April-the-fan on a date -- in part as a response to the online trolls who have mocked April for being (her word) fat after she posted photos of her cosplay -- they are drawn to one another despite the secrets they're both keeping. Because Marcus is Book!AeneasWouldNever, and April is UnapologeticLaviniaStan.
April and Marcus both feel they have something to hide: in Marcus's case, his intelligence, and his opinion of the show, in April's case her fandom persona (though she's just switched jobs and has decided not to hide who she really is any more). Both have parents who misunderstand and belittle them. Only one of them has a reputation that would be destroyed if his fix-it fanfiction was discovered ...
This is a surprisingly hard novel to review. I enjoyed it a lot, possibly because I'm familiar with the fandom milieu, but I also found the keeping of secrets and the toxic parenting very uncomfortable. I really liked the way that the interstitial chapters -- fanfic by both protagonists, excerpts from the scripts of some of Marcus's less intellectual roles (Sharkphoon!), online chats between Book!AeneasWouldNever and UnapologeticLaviniaStan -- illustrated their pasts and the growth of their online friendship. And -- though I was never part of 'Game of Thrones' fandom -- I enjoyed the sly allusions to and gentle mockery of that show. And I very much appreciated how the characters' issues (Marcus's dyslexia, April's fatness) were written: unapologetic, uncritical, accepting.
This was great fun and thoroughly grounded in its setting: Dade knows her way around online fandom. It did make me realise just how much of a problem I have with unspoken secrets in a relationship, especially when they're one-sided. But I almost cheered out loud at the finale, when Marcus, in the most public setting possible, makes his feelings known (and supports his best friend and co-star Alex, who's dealing with problems of his own -- to be revealed in Dade's next novel, All the Feels).
April and Marcus are thoroughly credible characters: they feel familiar and likeable. And, just like real people, they sometimes make the wrong decisions. I wasn't always comfortable with their choices but they felt organic, realistic, likely.
I did want Dade to do more with the blurring of actor and character: with April's feelings about having sex with a man who literally embodies the character who's inspired her to write hundreds of thousands of words of (often explicit) fanfic. But that's not a problem with the novel, just a personal observation. I'll look out for more by this author.
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