This was more mystery than romance, so if you love mystery than I think you'll love it, but if you're going to read it for romance, you may be disappointed. It had great writing and good characters, but just keep in mind if you want more mystery or more romance when you decide to read it.

I have some mixed feelings about this one. I really liked the premise of the book, and the inclusion of fanfiction and mystery elements brought a unique dimension to the story. I found myself very drawn in to the first half of the book by the mystery and enjoyed discovering clues with the characters as they came.

Somewhere in the second half, however, my interest in the book started to drop off a bit. There was just too much going on for me to keep my focus on the clues, the podcast, the romance, the family drama. It was a bit too all over the place.

However, I really appreciated the level of detail and back story put into the characters, the studio, Craven's Daughter, etc. I think if the book had been more focused on just one plotline or goal, such as the murder mystery, the romance, the Big Name Fan, or the revival of the Henri and Cora romance, it would have been a more satisfying read.

In terms of the romance, I liked Sam and Bex's chemistry, but I didn't feel overwhelmed with excitement for their love story's development. I also wasn't as invested in it as I feel I should've been for a book centering around a queer romantic TV show and romance fanfics. The few Henri and Cora romance moments actually appealed more to me than Sam and Bex's.

Overall, this book has some pretty cool elements like the podcast and fanfiction, a sapphic romance, and a murder mystery to be solved. However, with so much going on it is easy to be overwhelmed! 3.6/5 stars rounded up.

This was a bit slow to start and I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue reading. However I decided to persevere and am very pleased I did. The story gives some insight into the making of a TV series and how fans react to it. I do read fanfic myself so found this quite interesting. One fanfic writer has a big following. The big name fan. No one knows who it is. Bex and Sam decide to try and find out who it is. This discovery leads them to question the death of a friend during the filming of the last series of the show. The story is of a second chance romance between Bex and Sam and their investigation into their friend's death.

I found this book to be a really interesting mix of mystery novel and romance novel, which is not something I have read before. I am a big reader of both of these genres so I was really excited to get an ARC of this book. I feel like Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare did a good job of mixing the two together. I found the book had a really interesting cast of main and supporting characters. Sometimes when the book was referring to events that happened in the past was a little confusing to separate from the current events going on. I did enjoy reading this book, but overall I think it needed a little more editing to create a story that flowed better.

Cozy mystery and romance all in one.

I felt it took a new direction merging the two together which I really enjoyed. The writing was good as was the story an characters.

I rated it 3 due to a few things which my just be my interpretation. Firstly there was a lot going on and I understand mystery withing a mystery but it was a lot. I also struggled with the maturity of the adults knowing that Bex was around 26 when she started the show and it run for a long time as well as being a 5 year gap. I roughly put her round the 40 mark but I felt like it was early 20 year olds at times.

I did enjoy the concept of the romance but thing it should of always been let as what if. That it was always spoken about so the chemistry could of exploded more as adults.

This is just how I felt on the book and I will look forward to what Knox next writes.

Thank you to netgalley and the author for an arc

While there were so many things going on at once I absolutely adored this book.

The characters were so much fun to read about and sexism and homophobia in media is such an important conversation to have.

The fanfic parts were a bit cringey/badly written but honestly, most or the popular fanfiction I've read was badly written. 

I would've loved if the mystery part of the book felt like more of a reveal instead of just plainly telling us, but it's a nice quick romance read so my expectations weren't too high.

Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for this e-ARC in exchange for a honest review.

I first want to thank Kensington Publishing and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read Big Name Fan by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare. This opinion is solely mine. This book falls into two genres, romance and cozy mystery. The story follows Bex and Sam, two of Hollywood's most loved actresses. They both starred in leading roles in Craven's Daughter before filming ended abruptly. 5 years later, the two return for a reunion show and agree to host a weekly podcast showcasing fan favorite episodes up to the airing of the reunion show. In doing the podcast, they learn that the death of a beloved cast member may be more than what was originally thought. For me, while I enjoyed the story, I thought it moved pretty slow. It took me a little longer than normal to finish this one. In the romance side of this story, if you are looking for spice, there is none, not even fade to black. I rate this book 3 stars. While I liked that it was a different romance than I normally read, it took me a while to get into the story.

I really enjoyed this as a idea of a mystery novel, I enjoyed the idea of actors becoming real detectives and this was executed well. The characters were everything that I wanted and enjoyed the overall feel of them. It had that element that I was looking for and thought the plot worked well overall. Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare wrote this well and left me wanting more in this world.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc of this book. This is the first book I have read by these authors. This book is a combination murder mystery and romance. This book had two female main characters with an interesting cast of supporting main characters. This book does have some interesting twists and turns with who might have done it and why. I loved the concept of the fandom and fanfics being a major plot point. After reading this I will be reading more from these authors.

I'm not a big mystery reader, but I have read Ruthie Knox romances before, and I like anything where fanfic plays a big role and isn't derided. In this story, fanfic plays a big part in the murder mystery. But an actress who reads and loves fanfic bringing fanfic to other actresses and reading it out loud to them? No, fanfic aficionados would never. Fans know not to do that, and actors hate that.

There is a lot here that needed to be streamlined. There were so many moving parts, between the romance, the mystery, the podcast, and all the characters and their histories, that it was hard to keep track of everything. The info-dumping was done in very clunky ways and in ways that people who have spent so much time together would never talk to each other (i.e. reminding them of a former colleague of theirs with their full name and job).

The romance is not front and centre here, which is fine, but it also relied on a lot of backstory that was never made clear or fully grounded, so the romance never really got out of first and it was simply a discussion that was never had until it was convenient for the story--and by then, the anticipation had long since worn off.

The book does have interesting things to say about queer-baiting in media and about how white cis men wield power, though I never believed that the men in power weren't paying attention to what was happening on the podcast when it might affect their reputations and/or bottom line--the podcast would have been reported on, even if they weren't listening directly.

I did eventually get invested in the story, but there's just way too much in general that doesn't really come together here for me.

I don’t really know how to categorise this book, nor do I know how I feel about it.

Let’s just say I wanted our mains to just get together already so we could focus on the mystery. I think I am mostly confused about the series, “flashbacks” and fan fiction mixed into this story and also elaborately told. I like the mains and the premise of the story, it just is a bit much with all these mixed lines.

"Big Name Fan" was not what I expected at all, and so it was an incredibly surprising read! It is fresh, it is heart-warming and even heart-breaking at times, with my heart being tugged at multiple times for multiple different reasons!

In this novel, Mare and Knox introduce us to Bex and Sam, two actresses who used to work together on a detective tv show until five years prior. The show ended abruptly after Sam left unexpectedly, and after a colleague died on set too. Sam and Bex's characters had an unexplored sapphic chemistry that fans loved, but never saw fulfilled. A lot of queerbaiting, as we all know it. Now, five years later, Bex is begging Sam to get on a podcast and a reunion episode, so that their fans can have some closure, and maybe they also can get some emotional closure out of it.

However, what starts out being a podcast reminiscing about their past on set quickly turns into a search for their "Big Name Fan", someone on their set who also created the most popular fanfictions in their fandom. Sam and Bex gets closer as each podcast episodes passes, but the revelations that come from the podcast and their amateur investigation threaten both of them very dangerously.

I really enjoyed the structure of the novel, and especially Bex's character. The authors really gave it all in making us understand the reasoning behind her choices, her motivations and her feelings. She is the emotional core of the story, her turmoil and regrets, her hopes and dreams for herself and her sister are what drive the story forward.
Bex and Sam's relationship is slow to kick into gears again, they've hurt each other in different ways, and despite having being really close once, they are cautions not to make the same mistakes again. Let me tell you, this book is a tv show I would watch and scream at the tv for. I totally get why fans of their fictional tv show made it an incredibly popular series.

This was an incredibly enjoyable read that blended romance and action, leaning on the latter a little more. I appreciated Bexley's character a lot, and the way the authors had her develop thanks also to the mystery that has unfolded on set.

Thank you to Kensington Publishing | Kensington and NetGalley for allowing me to read this!
I'm not sure if I wasn't the right reader for this but...
I am not the bet with names. Despite the book being told only in one point of view, I found myself mixing up Bex and Sam often, forgetting who our POV was, simply because they read so similarly (other than the internal monologue). If you'd asked me who dropped out to take care of their sisters, and who had... red? hair, seventy-five percent of the way through, I wouldn't be able to tell you.
I thought it felt very,,.. out of touch an slightly pretentious the way "vaping pen" (or was it "vape pen") was referenced, in that it's... just a vape.

The action seemed to flip-flop wildly-- sometimes, finding out what happened to Jen was more important, sometimes reading the fanfic and seeing the scenes was. As a fanfic reader myself, who was deep in the trenches (Swen you were ROBBED), I felt the discourse about what could and couldn't really been shown on TV felt.... fairly modern in terms of "why couldn't we do this", in exactly how different queerness in mainstream media was treated. There were no other references to even other queer shows, with only a passing reference to Gray's Anatomy, making it feel extremely disconnected from the source material the book wanted to be honoring.

Anyway, it felt... messy. I feel it could have been one-- murder mystery-- or another -- getting together after a show had ended. I'm not sure both fit. I was also not fully certain what ages were supposed to be-- implication seemed to be mid/late 20s, maybe even early 30s? but they read as teenagers.

I really enjoyed the characters. More mystery than romance which I wasn't expecting. A fun story that I would recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the ARC

This was fun! What a cool concept. Two TV-detectives reunited for a TV-comeback when someone actually is murder and they need to solve it. In addition there's crazy chemistry between the two leads. Sapphic friends to strangers to lovers. a unique and entertaining mystery with a cute romance.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance reader copy of this book. I appreciate what the novel was trying to do, but it was not my cup of tea.

While the concept here was great, unfortunately the execution didn't rise to it. There was way too much going on between the mystery and the romance and the podcast and meta-fanfiction plot, and none of it was sufficiently developed to ultimately be satisfying. (And also if you've spent a lot of time in fandom, you too may find the way the characters talk about it like a primer and still get things wrong to be really annoying! Like just to give a couple of examples, a) that is NOT what head canon means, you mean fanon, and b) the characters keep saying the fanfiction in question is supposed to be really good and then the writing in the fanfiction excerpts is just so mediocre at best.)

As for Sam and Bex, the setup and dynamic between them is very similar to Katie and Wil in EVERYONE I KISSED SINCE YOU GOT FAMOUS by the same authors under the name Mae Marvel, but those characters and relationship are so much more developed and that book significantly better edited. I was hoping that BIG NAME FAN would be more similar to the authors' Mae Marvel title because I love sapphic celebrity romance (eg. K.E. Lane's indie classic AND PLAYING THE ROLE OF HERSELF), and a serial-numbers-filed-off RPF based on the premise of actresses on a procedural with a huge fandom that ships them falling in love IRL would've been amazing. Or even just the former plus a solid mystery--podcast and all--but sans the fandom-adjacent angle might have worked... but as it is, BIG NAME FAN bit off more than it could chew, and ended up a frustrating read for me because it had the potential to be so much more successful if it had just tried to do fewer things but do them better.

I loved the idea for this, but I didn't feel it was super well written. There was no real tension between Bex and Sam, so there was nothing really keeping them apart and they didn't have any palpable chemistry. The murder was also one of the main suspects very early on, so there wasn't any big plot twist or any real mystery to the mystery. This could have been great, but it needed a few more rounds of developmental edits - as it is, it reads more like a first draft.

While I really enjoyed the characters, I felt like the actual mystery was fairly lacking here and that the rest of the story suffered from it. I think the character development was full and smart, but I read a *lot* of mysteries and this one just didn’t hit, and I think it cost the characters and relationships to be slotted in around the mystery. It seems like this may be the start of a mystery series and I will absolutely read a second one, and I’m hopeful that maybe the characters will have more room to expand if they are not so deeply involved with the mystery.