Review by crispycritter - Business or Pleasure

crispycritter 's review for:

Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon

2.5

I DNFed Weather Girl last year thinking it was a right book wrong time situation. Unfortunately I think it’s an I don’t care for RLS situation. 🥲

Lots of stuff I don’t care for:

Poor mental health rep: Chandler's anxiety. Chandler has anxiety, which we know because she says "my anxiety made me . . ." "I painted my nails and picked at them because my anxiety." Chandler ALMOST had a panic attack one time. I feel like I was told throughout this book that Chandler had anxiety and was not shown. Did she not travel because of her anxiety? Because she also said her parents had already traveled a ton before she was born and she's super broke. So little clarity on how her anxiety impacted her (other than cuticle picking) and how it limited her. Was her anxiety part of the reason she mother henned her older parents?? We'll never know.
Poor mental health rep: Finn's OCD. I really needed some more information on how constant traveling and sleeping in hotel rooms and eating out all the time impacted his contamination OCD. We're to assume he's "fixed" from therapy and medication by the time this book takes place? Traveling basically full-time, our dude is just bulletproof? This made it feel like it was a convenient plot device to add character "depth" and to signal who the "bad guy" is. Finn's only meditation on this constant travel seems to be about how it's a lil lonely. Not how difficult it is to manage the lack of control over his food and sheets.
Constant references to millennial ennui which made my millennial ass constantly embarrassed
The ‘ole I’m embarrassed by this job because it's beneath me schtick which I do not relate to because it always makes our FMC sound bitter and feels like it's passing a moral judgement on that job. Another author may have had the skill to clearly communicate that ghostwriting is not inherently beneath their character, RSL wrote like ghostwriting IS beneath "real" writing. It reminded me of Pickleballers, where the main character wants to make "real" art but is roughin it in the craft world, because crafting is not real art. Stop it, you guys.
Taking the Teach Me trope and making it clinical. Jail. Seriously how did RSL make this so unsexy?
I did not buy into Finn's character. He didn't know where the clitoris was or what an orgasm looked like BUT he was also a nice dude who genuinely wanted to please his partners and was not defensive about being told he was bad in bed. We are to believe this specimen has been in multiple long term relationships, is still close with one of his exes, and is still licking ladies’ pubic bones (not a joke) until our magic FMC comes along? And all these ladies were just waiting for him to bring it up years later to confess their unhappiness? Chandler is just SO SPECIAL she is the only woman to actually ask for what she wants? Just no.
Brand naming all the time for no reason. Why did I need to know your sheets were from Bed, Bath & Beyond???
Stupid & irrelevant epigraphs. I almost universally love these. RSL seemed to forget these must add or illuminate something. They felt like they were just included because she thought they were cute? This is the second book I can think of where this didn't work for me - the other was The Book Eaters, and only because there were already cutesy chapter names in addition to try-hard Princess Bride quotes.
Writing about my hometown so poorly it made me think RSL looked it up on Wikipedia and said that’ll do
Eyeroll-inducing third-act conflict.

Overall, I think RSL just tried to do too much. A lot of the stuff she tried to discuss, particularly mental health, just didn't have the space to fully develop. So much of this book felt performative and hollow, which is unfortunate. It was her "spiciest" book maybe in the sense that there were more on page explicit scenes, but boy did it feel like I was taking a really awkward sex-ed class.