Book Review | Will They or Won’t They by Ava Wilder
If you’re thinking about checking out Will They or Won’t They yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first parts 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 Will They or Won’t They.
Ava Wilder has just one other book, How to Fake It in Hollywood. This is a new-to-me author, and it’s the book’s premise, title, and cover that drew me in.
Content Warning
I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for Will They or Won’t They:
Alcohol or drugs.
Explicit intimacy.
Mental illness.
Panic attacks.
Sexism.
Quick Synopsis
Will They or Won’t They is an enemies-to-lovers story set in Hollywood, with two TV show characters, Shane and Lilah, battling an attraction that lasts for the entirety of the show. When their show, Intangible, starts, the two of them fall into a fast-paced and intense fling, which Lilah insists is just that, and nothing more. When Shane has feelings that Lilah can’t—or won’t—reciprocate, their budding romance goes up in flames, and they spend the better part of the decade dealing with layers of feelings, leaving their friends, fans, and themselves to wonder what the finale looks like for the two of them.
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 Will They or Won’t They a four-star rating because I thought it was a good romance. It had plenty of yearning, spicy scenes, and a surprising amount of emotional intelligence. It was a refreshing departure from a lot of the toxic themes in some other romance novels.
If you read Will They or Won’t They and you enjoyed it, you may also like:
Summary
We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think Will They or Won’t They 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
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SPOILERS -
Will They or Won’t They starts with Lilah and Shane auditioning for the parts of Kate and Harrison in a ghost show called Intangible. The two of them hit it off straight away, and they’re cast as the leads in the show.
We then flash to several years later, at Lilah’s momentous return to Intangible, after several seasons away to film a movie. She never thought she would be returning, as she had hoped to launch her career in a more substantial way following the show, but after the movie flopped, she had to return.
“Despite their best efforts, the ratings had plummeted without her. Lilah didn’t let it go to her head. They’d be in the same situation if Shane had left instead of her. No matter how the two of them felt about each other when the cameras were off, it was the chemistry between their characters, Kate and Harrison, that made the show worth watching. She knew it. He knew it. The whole f—king world knew it.”
This is particularly upsetting because it means she’ll have to work alongside Shane, who plays one of the show’s main characters, Harrison. We learn through flashbacks and reflection that the two of them are not friendly, after a brief fling that ended suddenly and horribly.
While Lilah is a professionally trained actor, Shane is something of a wonder boy, with a story that other hopeful artists envy. He was working in a restaurant, waiting tables, when someone from the show asked him to come and audition for the part. We learn about Lilah’s interest in acting:
“Whenever people asked Lilah why she’d started acting, she had a few standard responses. Because her childhood asthma had prevented her from playing sports. Because she’d seen a community theater production of Annie when she was seven that left an indelible impression on her. Because her grandmother had been an actress, too—just a bit player, retired by twenty-five, but one of the last signed to Paramount before the dissolution of the studio system. None of them were lies, exactly, but the real answer was both simpler and far more complicated: because of her anxiety.”
This will be the last season of Intangible, and the network brings Lilah back to boost the ratings and make the final season something to remember. Both Lilah and Shane grapple with what their careers might look like after the conclusion of the show, and ease back into working together.
Right away, it’s clear to everyone that the two of them struggle to collaborate. The showrunner, Walt, insists that the two of them see a couple’s counselor to mend their working relationship. As they attend the therapy sessions, they start to learn how to communicate and bring up old grievances.
Even as they’re learning to talk to one another, they’re discovering that old attraction is just as strong as ever. During a risqué photoshoot to publicize the show, they’re forced to get comfy with one another. It’s during this that we learn they drunkenly got a couples tattoo together—which Lilah covered, and Shane didn’t.
These tattoos were the catalyst to the end of their relationship. When Lilah wakes up and is furious about the tattoo, and Shane doesn’t mind, she accuses him of thinking what they have is more than what it is. Though she regrets it, she ends things with him right then. Here’s a quote from the scene:
“Lilah sometimes felt like she was walking around with a snake coiled in her belly just waiting for her to open her mouth, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. She knew she was out of control—skin flushed, heart beating wildly, regret already brewing in the distant part of her mind that held her better judgement.”
Lilah tries to make friends with the new actors on set, who aren’t thrilled at her return, as it means most of them get even smaller roles than they anticipated. When Lilah comes to Shane’s birthday party, Shane ends up admitting the biggest reason he hates her: she slept with his brother.
Even though he’s still upset about this, the get closer, admitting more in therapy and comforting one another. Shane hugs Lilah before a talk show appearance, when she’s nervous, and speaks up against the talk show host when he makes a sexist comment toward her.
At another party, Lilah and Shane come close to kissing, but don’t. This is when Shane finds out that Lilah never actually slept with Dean, and that he just crashed on her couch for the night.
Through a flashback, we see when Shane finds out that Lilah is leaving the show, and we see them have one last frenzied hook-up before she’s gone for good (even though they’re still enemies at this point). During this interaction, Shane thinks that he loves her, reminds himself that he hates her, then thinks:
“But why did he hate her, again? Because she’d gotten his friend fired, someone he didn’t even talk to anymore? Because he’d been in love with her all those years ago, and she hadn’t felt the same way?”
In the present, the cast flies to Canada to film some intense episodes, with a guest director who turns out to be a major jerk. He calls Lilah a slur, and Shane tries to hit him, but Lilah stops him. They all rent a house for a Thanksgiving gathering, and Lilah and Shane end up staying the night, doing nothing but cuddling. Shane remarks that they’re passed the “sex without feelings” part of their relationship, and into the “feelings without sex” part.
They try to navigate their feelings for one another, even as their characters have a monumental kiss in the show. Lilah convinces Shane to accept an invitation to host this book’s version of Saturday Night Live, and when he goes, it ends up being a disaster. While watching him do a terrible job hosting, she knows she loves him, and comes up with a plan:
“When she looked at him now, trying as hard as he could to win over an increasingly disengaged audience, all she could see what that scared little boy he’d been, convinced he could fix everything if he was just agreeable enough, accommodating enough, lovable enough… she wasn’t powerless, she realized. There was something she could do… She slipped out of her seat, her feet carrying her backstage without a second thought.”
To distract from the humiliation of his terrible hosting, Lilah finds him and suggests they take their relationship public. They head out on to the stage for the final shot, and as the audience claps, they kiss.
They finally hook up in the present day, and after, they talk about why it took them so long to have a real relationship, with Lilah saying,
“I think we needed it. We weren’t ready for each other back then. We both had some growing up to do.”
With their relationship public, they get even more attention. They attend a conference together and are doing a panel when someone asks if the network is seriously going to renew the show. It comes out that the network is considering a few more seasons because of the attention their relationship is getting.
Lilah panics, because she doesn’t want to do the show, and Shane panics because he does. He feels like Intangible is the only thing he’s ever been good at, and that he won’t be able to act in anything else.
The story cuts away after this confrontation to a new article showing that the two of them broke up. We see Shane at the final wrap party for the show, watching Lilah from across the room. He and Walt talk about how it’s sad that they didn’t work out, but that the show shouldn’t have made decisions based on their relationship, anyway.
Immediately after the party, Shane and Lilah reunite in their room, because they never really broke up. It was a staged break-up so the show wouldn’t renew, and they would be able to keep some of their privacy. Shane is going back to school for psychology, and Lilah is booked in a new TV show. The story ends with Lilah revealing she got her half of their couples tattoo back on her hip.
Deep Dive
Praise
There are a lot of things to praise about this book. Firstly, the primary thing that can take me out of a romance book is cringe-y or unrealistic intimate (or spicy) scenes, but I thought the scenes in this book were pretty well done, and they didn’t take me out of the story.
I also appreciated that this book did a good job of making me truly wonder if Lilah and Shane would end up together or not. When we see the two of them arguing at the conference, I was truly wondering if they would make it. And honestly, I think I would have been okay with it if the book had gone in that direction. It would have been a surprising and kind of interesting switch-up.
This book takes a unique approach to their rekindling relationship. With the inclusion of a therapist and plenty of them being real adults, I felt it was a far cry from some of the miscommunication/man-child tropes I’ve seen (and not appreciated) in other romances. Nothing makes a romance book less appealing than a love interest (man) who doesn’t know how to share his feelings or acts like a buffoon. This is not that book.
Some general praise for this book is that I thought the writing was pretty good. It’s not often that I comment on this, as I usually try to stick to focusing on the plot and characters, but this book had better writing than some of the others I’ve read recently, and I appreciated that.
Criticism
I honestly don’t have a ton of critique for this one. My only complaint would be that the reflection and emotionally intelligent moments were sometimes frustrating and sometimes went on for too long. There were just a few times throughout the book that I felt the pace was starting to drag with all the thinking and pondering of the past, but they were few enough
All in all, I liked Will They or Won’t They, and I would definitely recommend it if you’re a romance fan, or a fan of enemies-to-lovers in particular.
These are some books I may read next:
