Bookish and the Beast

Bookish and the Beast is Ashley Poston's 2020 third and final instalment in the Once Upon a Con series, published by Quirk Books and standing comfortably on its own even as familiar faces from Geekerella and The Princess and the Fangirl make welcome appearances throughout.

Rosie Thorne is stuck. Stuck on her college essays, stuck in the small North Carolina town she's never left, and most of all stuck in grief over her mother's death - the same grief that's already cost her family the one thing that might have helped: her mother's treasured collection of rare Starfield novels, sold to cover hospital bills. So when Rosie chases a runaway dog into what she assumes is an abandoned house and ends up destroying a priceless first-edition Starfield novel in the process, the damage feels like a cruel echo of everything she's already lost. The house, it turns out, isn't abandoned. It belongs - temporarily - to Vance Reigns, Hollywood's reigning bad boy and Starfield's resident villain, exiled to small-town quiet after one tabloid scandal too many.

What follows is Enemies to Lovers built on a classic Beauty and the Beast frame: Rosie agrees to work off her debt in Vance's library, the two clash instantly, and the Forced Proximity of her daily visits slowly chips away at both of their defences. Their first real meeting, fittingly, happened with Vance's identity concealed behind a cosplay mask at the previous book's ExcelsiCon Ball - a Hidden Identity thread that gives their eventual recognition of each other real weight once the mask, literal and otherwise, finally comes off.

Poston leans fully into her Small Town Romance strengths here, and the contrast between Vance's exhausting, scrutinised Hollywood existence and the quiet rhythms of Rosie's hometown gives the book some of its most charming material - particularly as Vance, who's spent his whole life surrounded by people who want something from him, discovers what it feels like to simply be left alone with a library and a girl who initially can't stand him. Underneath the fairy tale structure, this is very much a book about Trauma and Healing: Rosie's grief for her mother runs through nearly every chapter, handled with real tenderness rather than treated as simple backstory, and her father's own quiet grieving - handled with humour rather than melodrama - gives the family dynamic genuine warmth.

The Found Family surrounding Rosie, particularly her two best friends, gives the book plenty of its Witty Banter & Sharp Dialogue, and Poston's continued commitment to Diverse Representation - a non-binary best friend, a bisexual father, a gay uncle for Vance - is handled with the same easy normalcy that's become a hallmark of the series. As with its predecessors, this is fundamentally a Coming of Age story as much as a romance: Rosie's arc toward believing her own story isn't over just because part of it ended is the book's real emotional centre, with Vance's slow thaw running alongside it.

Reception has been the most divided of the trilogy, with some longtime fans finding this entry a touch flatter than its predecessors and others calling it the series' best. Either way, it's a fitting, heartfelt close to a trilogy that's spent three books insisting fandom, found family, and a well-loved story are always worth holding onto.