Much Ado About Hating You bemused me. Romance novels about fandom always put me in that kind of mood. I am involved in fandom myself, so it’s always fun to see what they get right about the experience. Some of Much Ado About Hating You works; but some of it does not. The fandom part of the book worked – sometimes. What doesn’t is the utter immaturity of our main couple who act more like junior high school students than professional adults. They wish they were Beatrice and Benedick, but they’re not. The end result is a read that’s likely to grate on any reader over the age of eighteen.

Aidan Scott is the kind of fanfiction writer who scribbles smut at the office *, even though he’s an English professor at Nashville University and his job is in danger due to upcoming budget cuts. He’s also a tall ex hockey player with a six pack. Why? because every contemporary romance hero needs to have played hockey at some point these days. And no, this doesn’t mean anything significant to the plot, it’s only there so he can have moderate, underwritten conflict with his dad about how disappointing it is that he quit hockey to be a book nerd. He’s obsessed with Shakespeare, which is an improvement over him being obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, again like every other contemporary romance hero. And yes, he thinks he’s somehow schlubby.

Micah Mila is an auditor who’s been brought in to chop down his university’s staff. Since she’s the corporate version of a grim reaper, she is treated like a leper by most people. She also thinks she’s ugly even though she is pretty, petite, and has huge boobs. (And if you forget even once about her D’s, Aidan will bring it up when it’s his turn to narrate again.) Her ex devastated her self esteem and also ruined her life financially, taking her house, and forcing her parents to give her cash.

It’s hate at first sight in an elevator between Micha and Aidan, which leads to them glowering, backbiting, and playing dumb pranks on each other. Neither of them know that Micha is Aidan’s biggest fan online, drooling at the work of ShakespereInLust, who is currently rewriting Romeo and Juliet as a mafia romance** on a public, AO3-like fanfiction website.

By night Micha is using her vibrator to the tune of the adventures of “Rome and Jia” and DMing Aidan smush notes under the name Hot4Hermia. During the day, they fight because he gawked at her boobs in public and she is deeply offended. This escalates to her dumping hot sauce into his sandwich and him switching her coffee with decaf, giving her severe headaches and making her sleepy. Eventually something’s got to give, especially when they suddenly hook up on company property in real life, their online relationship escalates to romance and writing each other smut. More importantly: Micha still has to figure out who’s going to be fired by the end of the day.

I promise you all that it’s possible to be an adult and participate in fandom, though you wouldn’t be able to tell from Much Ado About Hating You. You can even find your true love without considering dumping laxatives into their coffee!

The quality of smut here is just sad. Aidan’s a Shakespearean professor. I have known many a professor who writes fanfic in my day and their prose sounds, well, collegiate on paper. Aidan’s reads like someone who spits out books for WattPad on a monthly basis. And Micha’s response to anything he writes is to say/think that it’s hot, so hot. Micha’s is, meanwhile, simply anatomically incorrect (“My clit jumps against my palm,” she writes at one point which, what? I know clitoral erections are a thing but between that and the boob obsession I sometimes felt like I was reading dude porn, and I’m saying this as someone who loves a good rack).

That is the level of repartee we have going here, and an example of the level of maturity Aian and Micha have. He is given a passionate speech about her breasts, which forces her to go “Wuh?! You think I’m pretty!” which instantly turns into a sexual encounter during teaching hours in a university conference room. The sex solves everything, even though they were literally trying to poison each other a minute ago. They absolutely read like teenage manga protagonists going at it, and it’s hard to buy anything that happens in the back half of the novel because of this.

What plunged this from a low-grade C into a D for me was Aidan’s solution to the messy firing conflict they have. The two of them have brewed up an HR nightmare no matter what they do, and even if she doesn’t turn in the report someone else will, but his suggestion to the problem is pie-in-the-sky ludicrous. Having read how they both write, no, this would not happen. Even E.L. James has more panache than they do. He is such a total dick about her job and how he KNOWS she doesn’t like it and blah blah – it feels like she’s OK with it because she wants him to like her. Sigh.

When your characters are bad writers AND bad people – bad enough that I wished the fictional site they uploaded their fic to was real so I could troll them – you know the book is bad. What can I say? My clit didn’t jump.

• Aidan is also the type of fanfic writer who ignores his comments, which immediately caused my lip to curl with disdain.
• So many authors already did this, to the point where there are ACTUAL fanfics featuring this premise on WattPad, none of them big enough to get…well, that would be a spoiler.