The thing is that I want to like Dade a lot more than I actually do. I keep putting these books on hold hoping that I’ll enjoy the execution as much as the premise, but as it were there’s a consistent mismatch.
Of all the novels so far, as it were, I think that this book held the most promise for me. I am a sucker for relationships built over time and UST banter, and the set up here seems ideal: Maria and Peter are costars on Gods of the Gates, the thinly veiled Game of Thrones joke that is wearing a little thin on this third excursion (we get it! DB Weiss and David Benioff are terrible! GoT jumped the shark! The point has been made!) but which nonetheless connects them with the web of the prior books in the Spoiler Alert universe. That web is also starting to fray a bit—unless you have a good memory of how the timelines intersected, you’re basically remembering character names and vague plot details before the overlap moves on and we’re back to Maria and Peter.
Given how much promise the set up had, I found myself disappointed in how Dade had it play out. Of course very sexy that their first interaction is a no-names ONS, but then that creates too much weird tension between them in a six-year montage that flies by in rapid time skips (next chapter: two years have passed). In my mind, a better set up could have been a reasonable Enemies to Lovers type slow burn (especially given the fanfiction hook up this series has) where their very reasonable differences in opinion could have been worked out over time. Instead, we jump from meeting to Dramatic Difference (mostly around Maria’s unabashed body positivity and Peter’s desire for financial stability at any cost) to reconciliation to Third Arc Issues to conclusion without much time to breathe. The entire book takes place over seven years and it felt like seven days/weeks, even.