The impossibility of a match between Wei-Wei and Gao looms large for much of the book, so readers who like their romance high on the angst and hopeless pining will want to snap this up.
I had no idea we were getting another Lotus Palace novel to follow up Lin’s utterly perfect “The Jade Temptress,” and while this novel doesn’t quite reach the level of the previous one, it’s still a welcome combination of gripping mystery and cross-class romance. Instead they use boldness, stubbornness and raw brilliance to untangle a mystery that threads its way through the imperial city to the highest levels of the court. Our leads are barred from this path - Lady Bai Wei-Ling on account of her gender, and Gao on account of his class and illiteracy. In the Tang Dynasty setting of Jeannie Lin’s THE HIDDEN MOON (self-published, 328 pp., e-book, $4.99), scholarship is the basis for political advancement and intrigue. It takes a skillful writer to juggle so many elements, yet the emotional through-line shines clear and strong at every point. This book frolics through fields of fannish allusion and metatext: In addition to scenes from the show and “Aeneid” in-jokes, we have snippets of April’s incisive Lavinia takes, Marcus’s explorations of Aeneas’ inner turmoil, other people’s fics about Marcus and April’s date, and - best of all - excerpts from the gloriously bonkers rom-com scripts in which Marcus paid his dues as an up-and-coming actor.
Many of you are now rubbing your hands in unholy glee at the premise, and Dade delivers and then some. The pair have only just met in real life, but they’ve unknowingly been online best friends for years under their pseudonyms on a fanfic server. He’s asked a fan - a keen-eyed geologist named April - to dinner as a publicity stunt, after pictures of her character cosplay go viral and trolls viciously mock her body size. Marcus is a gifted actor who plays Aeneas he also plays dumb in interviews to hide his dyslexia. In Dade’s story, a book series based on Virgil’s “Aeneid” has spawned a big-budget prestige television adaptation (aah, if only).
We’ll have to scrabble together what scraps of learning we can - just like the scientists, scholars, sauce makers and stroke survivors featured in this month’s romances.įirst, I’m delighted to have the chance to directly and sincerely compare a romance novel to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Olivia Dade’s SPOILER ALERT (Avon, 416 pp., paper, $15.99), like that impossible novel, takes an ancient poem as a jumping-off point for a bold and joyous experiment in form. The start of the school year is always autumn’s great punctuation mark: I tend to think of it as the opening of a pair of brackets, but this year with all the confusion and panic it feels more like an interrobang.
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