Plot: Athena’s short-lived engagement has just ended, because her fiancé was convinced by his brother that they were a bad match. Rude. Also, maybe a little bit accurate, since he’s a doctor and she is sort of a hot mess that was relying on this marriage to buy her time to figure out her career and finances after her teaching job burned her out. Well, she might be out of money and resources, but she was not out of spite. She’d put a downpayment on a house in her fiancé’s childhood town, Harlot’s Bay, as a wedding gift to him. And she had nowhere else to go, so fuck it, she was moving there herself. And if it turns out that the same fucking brother who blew up her life lived next door? Well, that simply allows for a greater allocation of Athena’s spite reserves. Shenanigans ensue.
This is a hard book to review, because it is all over the place. This is also very much a deliberate choice by Dade, but I suspect each reader’s milage will vary. Increasingly, rom-coms are looking to tap into serious topics, and for good reason. If we’ve learned anything from what type of media becomes popular in periods of societal distress (it’s always comedies), it seems inevitable that the people who want to make people laugh are also carrying something heavier inside them that deserves to be in the light. In At First Spite, Dade has written a sweet, light, opposites attract comedy, that includes not only themes of mental illness, but a severe mental health crisis by a lead character.
Dade clearly worked hard to walk the line carefully of representing such a situation with care, compassion, and accuracy, and to show the reader that people all have both light and darkness inside them. In that way, a comedy is almost the perfect set up for this, because you are by definition including both in the story in a way that hopefully leaves the reader feeling challenged, emotionally full, but also happy. It is a comedy, after all.
For me, I struggled with the balance. For much of the first half of the book, where we were supposed to laugh along with her hijinks and pranks (the comedy bit), to me these mostly came across as further proof that Athena’s struggles are mostly grounded in the fact that she’s an overgrown child looking for a new parent to do all that adult stuff for her rather than fun diversions. Likewise, Matthew comes across as such a powerfully sullen rain cloud, not just dark but bleak. In the fun bits! Between the two of them, little about the situation or their evolving relationship rang true.
At the same time, the demons haunting both their heads also have multiple properties in my brain, and the way Dade dealt with them felt irritatingly affirming and also made me feel like a dick about how judgemental I was in the first half.
But honestly, it didn’t end up making me enjoy the book more on balance. I wanted a comedy, and I didn’t laugh. But I don’t think that means you won’t.