Spoiler Alert

I've been dipping my toe back into the M/F contemporary romance pool lately for some reason, after several years of reading primarily queer romance. Olivia Dade is a fairly new-to-me author (I've only read her story in the [b:He's Come Undone: A Romance Anthology 51831578 He's Come Undone A Romance Anthology Emma Barry https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1582818691l/51831578.SY75.jpg 76324549]) and I was impressed by Spoiler Alert's quirky, competent heroine, smooth character arcs and sly sense of humor. April is passionate about her job as a geologist, and she's tired of hiding or apologizing for the other aspects of her personality. She's fat, she writes fan-fiction about two characters from a fantasy television show (not dissimilar to “Game of Thrones” in that the show has gone beyond the book canon and the fans are not happy with its recent direction), and she's ready to show herself to the world by cosplaying her favorite character at an upcoming convention. Unbeknownst to her, she's in a “You've Got Mail/Shop Around the Corner” thing going with Marcus, who is dating her as the handsome but somewhat dim lead actor from her favorite show, while trying not to let her realize that he is also her beta reader on the fanfic site. Both Marcus and April have parents who were hypercritical of them - Marcus for his (long undiagnosed) dyslexia and April for her weight. Dade shows how their relationship slowly helps them overcome those early hurts and determine their own value while also making them wary of trusting each other with their real selves. The geologist rock analogies are a tad heavy-handed but on target. The book's climactic scene is appropriately swoon-worthy, and their happy ending well-deserved. I'm not at all familiar with the fan fiction world, so a lot of the references were wasted on me, but I enjoyed the excerpts that April and Marcus wrote. The other”interstitial” chapters highlighting the poorly conceived scripts from Marcus' previous movies and TV shows were hilarious (especially how the common theme is that the female characters exist only to die and give the hero his character arc) and helped illuminate the plot.There's a little bit too much of information about Marcus' co-star Alex and the woman assigned to keep him from misbehaving; they're obviously the subject of the next book in the series (with a great deal of pegging apparently) but I found them to be distracting sequel bait. Other than that, however, I really enjoyed this book. If this is what contemporary romance looks like in the 2020s I may have missed out by avoiding it for so long.N.B. I'm not going to comment on the fat representation because it is not something I have personal experience with, but I think readers will appreciate the fact that April is portrayed as a fat, healthy woman whom Marcus finds incredibly attractive. ARC received by Net Galley in exchange for honest review.