Book Review | Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon
If you’re thinking about checking out Business or Pleasure yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about Business or Pleasure.
Rachel Lynn Solomon is definitely not a new-to-me author. I’ve read (and really enjoyed) many of her books, including Ex Talk, Weather Girl, and See You Yesterday. The first book of hers I read of Ex Talk, when I first tried to start my YouTube channel in 2020. Then again, when I tried to start consistently reviewing books in 2022, I read Weather Girl. A few months ago I read See You Yesterday just because I recognized her name and was looking for something good to read. So far, a Rachel Lynn Solomon book has not been a miss for me.
Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Content Warning
I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for Business or Pleasure:
Ableism.
Alcohol or drugs.
Antisemitism.
Explicit intimacy.
Mental illness.
Nudity.
Panic attacks.
Pregnancy.
Quick Synopsis
Business or Pleasure is a romance story featuring Chandler Cohen, a ghostwriter, and Finn Walsh, a washed-up actor from a long-over werewolf TV show. Chandler doesn’t really want to be a ghost writer, and Finn Walsh doesn’t really want to be a washed-up actor. Business or Pleasure tells the story of what happens when they have a not-so-great one-night-stand, then find out Chandler is the new ghostwriter for Finn Walsh’s autobiography. When the two are forced to spend more time together and Finn asks Chandler for a few pointers, their relationship might cross over the line from coworkers to friends, and even to something more serious.
My Rating
Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:
One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.
My Rating Scale
By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.
I gave this Business or Pleasure a four star rating because I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys romance. I thought the conflict was realistic and the characters had good chemistry.
If you read Business or Pleasure and you enjoyed it, you may also like:
Will They or Won’t They by Ava Wilder
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez
Behind the Scenes by Karelia Stetz-Waters
Summary
We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think Business or Pleasure sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.
SPOILERS
-
SPOILERS -
Business or Pleasure opens with Chandler Cohen attending a book signing for the book she wrote, except she’s not the speaker, and not technically the author, either. Instead, an influencer stands on the stage and talks about the lessons from the book. When it’s over, Chandler goes to get her book signed, imagining tons of cute interactions between herself and the influencer, but when she gets to the table, the influencer doesn’t recognize her, or her name, at all.
Dejected from this, a recent romantic rejection, and the feeling of being invisible, Chandler goes to a bar to drink away her worries. She meets a man there and the two of them hit it off. They banter easily, flirting starts, and before she knows it, despite being a “relationship girl” the two of them are back at his hotel room together.
The one-night-stand isn’t as magical as Chandler would have thought, based on their connection. After horrible sex, she waits for him to fall asleep and sneaks out of his room. The next day, she gets a call from her agent, who tells her there’s a client who wants a last-minute meeting with her for a book deal.
When she arrives at the restaurant for the meeting, it’s—shocker—the man from the night before and his manager. He gave her fake name when they first met, but now she learns his name is Finn Walsh, and he would like for her to write his book.
He’s a huge nerd who played a character on a werewolf show years ago, and now he spends most his time circling between different conventions and starring in low-budget films to make money. It’s just been announced that the cast from the show are going to have a reunion show at the end of the year.
She thinks immediately that she won’t take the deal, but then it’s for more money that any of her previous gigs, and he expresses that he would genuinely like for her to write it, as he believes she’s a great writer. They agree to never talk about it again, and Chandler accepts the job.
Part of the job includes her traveling around with Finn to all his nerdy conventions, so she packs up and accepts the fact that she’ll be spending a lot of time with him. After a little while traveling together, Chandler decides she can’t stand the tension between them and addresses the elephant in the room: the terrible one-night-stand. Unfortunately, Finn doesn’t seem to realize that Chandler didn’t have a good time.
“I quietly burst into flames. It’s criminal that he’s not seeing the innuendo. And that’s when I realize I cannot keep reacting to him like this. Because even if Finn is acting perfectly professional, the history between us is a swath of cotton in my throat, a fist wrapped tight around my lungs…
“I feel like… we might need to talk about the thing we said we weren’t going to talk about?”
“I don’t see why it has to affect our working relationship,” he finally says. “What’s one night of mind-blowing sex between co-workers?””
After Finn says this, Chandler chokes on an olive and spills her water, bringing out the truth. Finn is embarrassed to hear what the experience was like for her, then cuts their evening short and decides to return to the hotel. Chandler is sure after this that he’s going to fire her from her ghostwriting position.
She keeps believing this, that he’s going to fire her, for a few days, until she finally bursts and asks him when he plans on firing her. He’s surprised and somewhat appalled by this, then admits that he went back to his room and called his previous exes, only to find out that he’s never been very good in bed.
He thanks her for being honest and asks her for specifics about what he did wrong. Chandler starts going through the list of things, then Finn asks her for her tips. Being sex-positive, Chandler explains how he could have done things better. She makes an offhanded joke about being his teacher, and he takes it seriously, asking her if it’s something she’d really do. Surprising herself, she says that she would.
After this exchange, the two of them agree to the lessons, and begin meeting in their hotels and rentals after being at conventions. To write the book, Chandler gets closer to Finn, learning more about his life and his OCD. They get closer and closer, working on the book, having their lessons, and traveling together.
Chandler comes to his hometown with him and meets his mom and best friend. She grapples with what she wants for her future—whether she plans to continue writing for other people, or if she wants to go out on a limb and write her own stuff.
Meanwhile, Chandler and Finn continue to grow closer, with tender kisses and him calling her “sweetheart” between their lessons. Chandler comes with Finn to a dinner with his other cast mates, and learns that some of them are less than kind to him.
Chandler realizes she’s in love with him, and tells him she thinks they should stop the lessons. He agrees, and says he thought it was obvious they weren’t lessons anymore, and that the two of them have something. They confess their love to one another, but the story isn’t over yet—there are still some logistical concerns for them being together.
Finn travels all the time and Chandler doesn’t want to leave Seattle, which is her hometown. She starts to work more on her own book, and she and Finn get closer to finishing his. Chandler gets a huge offer to write another celebrity book, and waffles over whether or not to accept.
After realizing there’s too much to decide, Chandler runs away and flies home to think. She ends up writing her cozy mystery novel and deciding she’s not going to ghost write anymore, then she attends the reunion for the werewolf show. Her and Finn catch each other’s eyes through the crowd, and she knows she’s going to try and make it work.
At the end of the book, Chandler has published her cozy mystery and is at a book signing. She’s working on her second book and Finn is running a mental health nonprofit, and they’re engaged to be married.
Deep Dive
Praise
I always like to start with what I like first, and I think the first thing to mention about this book is the characters. Chandler and Finn feel like real people, and the connection between them feels real as well. Another thing I appreciated about this book was the sex positivity, and how it explored the ideas of communication, consent, and worthwhile intimacy.
At the beginning of the book, we see Chandler at a booksigning, not getting even the slightest bit of recognition for the book she wrote. We end the book at another book signing, but this time she’s reveling in the success of Finn’s book, thinking about her next book, and being recognized as the author of her own cozy mystery. I liked this cirularity, and felt it was emphasized well with Finn offering to give her pointers on signing the books.
Though this is definitely a romance book—and a pretty spicy one, at that—it’s also a story about personal growth and development. It shows how Chandler goes from going with the flow and doing whatever life throws her way to making her own decisions. We start to see this growth early on in the book, when she accepts the offer to write Finn’s book, and then when she agrees to the lessons:
“The past few years have been a study in exposition, a whole lot of build up that’s led me absolutely nowhere. My life has been my laptop and me sunk deep in the Seattle quicksand, with occasional breaks for friends and family. I’ve canceled dates and missed out on opportunities because I was too chained to work that wouldn’t love me back. This bizarrely appealing idea of helping Finn in bed—it would be fun.
I think about the person I was the night I met Finn, how much I loved that caution to the wind version of myself. I was convinced that wasn’t me at all. But maybe it can be.”
The idea in this book is far-fetched for real life—that two people working together would engage in a lesson-type structure for being intimate, but I think this book handles it well. The characters feel real, and so when they’re talking about this arrangement, it doesn’t feel cartoonish or ridiculous, it almost feels like something that could really happen.
Criticism
I liked the detail about Finn and his OCD, and felt that was fairly fleshed out and realistic. I’m being very nitpicky here because I really liked this book, but there are two areas I could apply some critique. The conflict between Finn and the rest of the werewolf cast and Ethan—the stuck up actor who played the main character. It feels like this conflict got a little bit of closure during the reunion, when one of the other actors says she would be happy to do a reunion, even if Ethan wouldn’t, and he ends up looking a little bit like an asshole.
But ultimately, I might have liked a little more resolution here. Finn reveals that after Ethan found out about his OCD, he would go out of his way to make him uncomfortable, by doing things like touching all the food on set. Even if Finn didn’t want to expose Ethan for the creep he was in his book, something like a confrontation or Ethan not being invited back to the show would have been satisfying.
There was also another minor conflict about Chandler and her overprotectiveness of her parents. The resolution to this one at the end was just her parents telling Chandler not to worry about them, and it felt a little watery to me. I would have liked something a little more concrete here, like her parents proving they can still take care of her, or some other event that would help her change her behavior.
All in all, I really liked Business or Pleasure and would definitely recommend it if you enjoy romance. It’s got tons of great characterization and a realness that helps you sink into the book.
These area some books I may read next:
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei
Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena
With Love, From Cold Word by Alicia Thompson
