Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon is a book that doesn't really know what it wants to be. A romance, sure. But also, a detailed primer on female anatomy. Did you know that only a third of the clitoris is external? Solomon takes several long detours from the story for expository speeches about this. (Side note: I'm all for learning about female anatomy. I highly recommend Vagina Obscura by Rachel Gross.) And, kinda sorta a book about what it's like to have obsessive-compulsive disorder, although we never really get any insight into that because hero Finn, who suffers from OCD, mentions it in passing but has it almost completely under control with medication and never talks in any detail about his life before that.
Speaking of Finn, this would have been a much more interesting book if it had been from his perspective. Heroine Chandler, at the end of the day, just does not offer much as a character. She's a former journalism student and current celebrity memoir ghost writer who has never left her home town, even for a vacation. (Because, she explains, her parents were hippies who had traveled so much before she was born that they didn't feel like they needed to go anywhere after she was born. Uh, sure . . . ) She would really prefer to be a novelist but the thought of failure is just too, too scary. In the middle of the book she has a panic attack, even though she has never mentioned that she suffers from them and never suffers from another one. And, oh, yeah, she minored in Human Sexuality or something so she can give long discourses on the clitoris.
Finn, on the other hand . . . Finn is a minor celebrity who a few years earlier had starred in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like show. (Only it's set in college, which makes it super unique, according to the author.) As mentioned above, Finn suffers from OCD but has gotten it under control for the most part. I'd like to know a whole lot more about what that was like for him.
Also, even though Finn has had at least one relationship with a woman that lasted three years, he is terrible in bed. We meet the woman, and she seems cool enough, and Finn seems like someone who wants to be good at sex, so how could this have happened? Why did the woman put up with three years of bad sex? Why has it never occurred to Finn to ask his partners what they like? What is the story here?
And, why do both Finn and Chandler have so few friends? Chandler's best friend is her cousin, and there's a guy from college she's still kind of hung up on. She has no other social life. Finn has been making the Comic Con circuit for years, but other than people from his own show seems to have developed no relationships with the other panelists, who he must see over and over again.
This is a book that tries, and fails, to be more than it is. That said, the germ of the story -- ghostwriter and guy she is ghostwriting for have hot sex and fall in love while going to various Comic Cons around the country -- is a good one, and when the book focuses on the story it's pretty good. But I could do without the biology lectures and the mental health virtue signalling.
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