Review: Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

This book is a weird one to rate! I have pretty divided feelings but still would generally recommend the book to anyone interested in reading it.

Something to Talk About is a romance that follows Emma and Jo. Jo is a former child-star turned Chinese-American closeted lesbian Shonda Rhimes, and Emma is a white bisexual film school drop-out working as Jo's assistant while being completely unsure what her next step in life is. The conflict takes off when Emma accompanies Jo to an award show, and people begin to mistakingly start asserting that Jo is dating her assistant Emma. It's not a fake dating book, though I think before I read the synopsis, I had vaguely conceptualized it as that in my head. The book has a not-insignificant portion that deals with the Times Up movement.

I am going to being my opinions with some positives! The book is pretty fun to read! The plot does address some serious topics as the book goes on, but overall the book is pretty happy and genuinely a fun read. Meryl Wilsner's writing style is so lovely to read. They really write in a very polished, clear, easy-to-read manner; it was an excellent reading experience where I didn't really notice the words because I was so involved with the story. This is not to say that the prose is bad; I just want to emphasize how easy to read this book was. I fully intend to read Meryl Wilsner's next book, it is currently untitled, but it seems like a fun queer rom-com with a podcast at its center. So take my critique with the grain of salt that I intend to keep reading this author.

A lot of my conflicted feelings come from the book dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace while also being an employee/boss romance. I feel tension in this because I think a lot of this was done really well, but especially because of the workplace sexual harassment plotline, I was primed to be thinking very seriously about the power dynamics and ethics of the situation. I think if the book had just had one element and not the other (in either direction), I would feel significantly less indecisiveness. It does not really matter that Emma, the assistant, instigates all of the romance in the book and that their relationship really does not become an actual thing while Emma works for Jo, being in Jo's head and knowing that she knows the way she feels is not a workplace appropriate feeling is weird to read when you just had a chapter about workplace sexual harassment. I don't think in the narrative; anyone behaves in a way that is abhorrent or inherently exploitive; the important thing is that the relationship could have been due to the power balance. I have read other books with an uncool power imbalance, some of which I think I did like when I read them in the past, but I don't seek out stories with this.

I also am not sure I liked how money was discussed in this book. I just think Jo being incredibly wealthy was glazed over regarding the actual power that comes with that kind of wealth. It was especially odd when so much of the book's middle was about power. It also had a lot of the benevolent billionaire trope that I have grown iffy about over the years.

Little things that bothered me were that some of the earlier Hollywood ish stuff in the story seemed odd; if you are a person who works in the industry, it might not be your book. Though I know nothing about anything in this arena, and the amount of incredibly 'normal' life stuff that is in the book totally balances this out, in my opinion. Also, there is a brief time period where one character thinks the other is in a relationship that they are not in, and I tend to dislike this trope. It isn't bad, lots of people like it, I just don't.

My last negative opinion about the book was there is a leak on the production of the fake tv show Jo runs, who is selling stories about Emma and Jo's 'relationship.' I think the person who did this was a little too obvious immediately upon meeting them and that they really should have been introduced earlier on in the story. I also would have liked there to be a few people that it could have been; there really were not many options. I think all of my problems with this book could be boiled down to thinking that the book tried to talk about too many topics in 300ish pages; it just couldn't fit as much plot as it had in this amount of pages.

I feel bad that I have had so much to write about the aspects of this book that I didn't like because I genuinely did really like a lot of things in this book. The romance is incredibly sweet; they do have a 10 year age difference (I know some folks avoid books with large age gaps), but I really liked reading a book where you are reading about how incredibly attractive someone finds a 40-year-old woman; you don't get that a lot. If you are a person who loves to read about pining in their romance, this book is chock-full of pining. They have a very sensible thing keeping them apart; nothing about that feels like it is dragged on too long.

I did really like the relationship between Emma and her sister and between Jo and her best friend. There are certainly romances that don't spend any time on relationships outside the book's romantic plot, and this is not one of them. Emma's sister owns a restaurant and is shown to have desires outside of her relationship with her sister, she is a pretty fun character, and I always loved having her on the page. And she owns a bakery, which is the highest calling anyone can have in life, so obviously, I loved her. Jo's best friend was snarky and smart and made me giggle a few times on the page.

This book is also just a really fast read. It was a fun time; I absolutely flew through the story. Wilsners writing makes it so easy to fly through the story. I wanted to get to the end, so this book was a really quick read; I needed to know when Emma and Jo were going to get their shit together.

I don’t do half stars, but this is a book where I really feel like being a half-star person would be beneficial. I am so torn between 3 and 4 stars. Once I hit a definitive answer, I will be back to update, it feels like the negatives should have pulled the review to be 3 stars, but most of the content I found iffy happens in only about a third of the book.

I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would totally recommend this book, especially so you can develop your own opinion on some of the bits I was iffy about; maybe your opinions will differ from mine! If you do really like romance, especially if you have a severe lack of sapphic romance in your life, I do think you should give this book a shot! It is a fun read, and I am genuinely excited to read Wilsner's future books. I am ready to follow their career.