Story Blurb
Marcus Caster-Rupp has a secret. The world may know him as Aeneas, star of the biggest show on television, but fanfiction readers call him something else: Book!AeneasWouldNever. Marcus gets out his frustrations with the show through anonymous stories about the internet’s favorite couple, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone discovered his online persona, he’d be finished in Hollywood.
April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s long hidden her fanfic and cosplay hobbies from her “real life”—but not anymore. When she dares to post her latest costume creation on Twitter, her plus-size take goes viral. And when Marcus asks her out to spite her internet critics, truth officially becomes stranger than fanfiction.
On their date, Marcus quickly realizes he wants more from April than a one-time publicity stunt. But when he discovers she’s Unapologetic Lavinia Stan, his closest fandom friend, he has one more huge secret to keep 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?
My Thoughts/Opinion
I liked the premise of this story, and I started out really liking the main characters. I also liked the format of the story with inserts of the fanfic stories they'd written. April is a self-proclaimed fat girl and for the first part of the story, I could see the potential the author intended to a) build a great romance and b) build April's self worth. Unfortunately, her body size ended up defining her for the entire story, and was basically validation for her terrible behavior. Too many times she jumped to conclusions about others' motivations and it became almost untenable. I got to the point where I lost my motivation to care much about their HEA.
Favorite Quote:
“Black to disappear. Extra fabric to disguise. As always, fatness was a sin, most likely mortal rather than venial.”