At First Spite (February 13, 2024) is the incomparable Olivia Dade’s newest romance, the first in her Harlot’s Bay series, set in a fictional coastal Maryland small town. She is always explicitly fat-positive, and At First Spite is no exception.
We first meet Athena Greydon at her engagement party to pediatrician Johnny Vine, where she has an amazing conversation with a man that is not her fiancé, but we later learn is his brother Matthew, when Athena overhears a conversation between them that she is not intended to hear.
Jump ahead a few months, Athena is living in the spite house next to Johnny’s house, that she bought as a wedding present to him, while he has gone to Hawaii on the honeymoon she planned, while he called off the wedding at his brother’s insistence. But the spite house is directly across the alley from Matthew’s house as well, and now Athena is alone in a small town, without a job, without the man she thought she would marry, and in close proximity to the man that broke them up!
Although it’s full of Dade’s usual humor, At First Spite also deals with Athena’s depression, and Matthew’s long-held grief and consequent caretaking of his brother Johnny, and really, everyone around him.
Athena is fat, and I loved that Dade made Matthew and Johnny physicians who are attracted to Athena and don’t follow the current medical model of pathologizing fatness. (I don’t think this was realistic, but hey, it’s a romance so I suspended my disbelief!) Also, Athena was written to me as neurodivergent, with ADHD or ASD characteristics. There were queer supporting characters, and a monster-romance subplot–I kept expecting the author of the monster romance books that were the talk of the town to be someone among them.
I will read anything Olivia Dade writes, no exceptions. Highly recommend if you want a fat-positive contemporary romance and can handle the honest depictions of depression and long-standing childhood grief.
Reading While Fat 
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