The Ex Talk is an enemies-to-lovers fake relationship romance set in the world of public radio. It is also something of a belated coming of age story.

Shay Goldstein has been working at Pacific Public Radio for ten years, beginning as the ‘wunderkind’ intern, and rising to the role of producer of the station’s flagship show, Puget Sounds. She loves public radio for its ability to tell stories that connect personally with listeners, and for the connection it gives her to her father, a fellow public radio fan, who passed away when she was in high school.

As the youngest person at the station, she also loves being thought of as the up-and-coming young hotshot… and so she doesn’t love it very much at all when 24-year-old Dominic Yun is hired, fresh from a master’s in journalism, and determined to do ‘real’ news stories, even if that means kicking Shay out of her recording booth.

Matters get even worse when it becomes clear that the station is about to undergo downsizing, and suddenly it seems that the only way Shay can keep her job is by hosting a new program in which she and Dominic pretend to be exes and talk about modern relationships. Not, of course, that she and Dominic have ever dated, but that’s not going to stop their boss, Kent:

Kent’s grin is terrifying. “See? This is it. This is what I’m talking about. This… thing you two have. It’s fascinating. I see the way you two act around the newsroom. I know I spent a lot of time in this office, but I’m perceptive. You two have this great chemistry, this natural conflict. Dominic is all about the news and the hard facts, and, Shay, you like the more human-centred, softer pieces.”

(Incidentally, if Kent just pinged your sexism radar, well done you. He is an utter sexist jerk in that annoyingly plausibly deniable way where women just somehow are the ones who get asked to take notes because they are better at multitasking, and so forth. Entirely realistic, but ugh.)

The main part of the story is a lot of fun. Dominic and Shay really do have great chemistry, and their bickering, both friendly and less so, is clever and funny and pretty charming. They are both very smart, very competent people who talk for a living (or at least aspire to do so), and their banter reflects that. Once they start running the show, we also get some transcripts, and these are just glorious. I could have read a whole book of them (seriously, a sort of epistolary novel made from radio transcripts? mmm, yes please…).

DOMINIC YUN: On this first episode, we’re talking about why we broke up. We’ll take some calls a little later, but we wanted to start with our story, because clearly it’s something even Shay and I can’t agree on. Here are some other reasons couple break up these days: jealousy, broken promises, insecurity, infidelity–

SHAY GOLDSTEIN: Working too closely with your partner.

DOMINIC YUN: Or maybe interrupting them constantly.

SHAY GOLDSTEIN: I thought this was friendly banter?

DOMINIC YUN: I feel like that would require you being friendly.

The Ex Talk is written in the first person and from Shay’s perspective. Her narrative voice is funny and honest and dry, and she is quite self-aware. She isn’t someone who deals well with change, and there is a lot of change going on for her in this book: a new dog (her first ever pet); her widowed mother is planning to marry again after ten years; her best friend, Ameena, is interviewing for a dream job which would take her to the other side of the country; and, of course, her own job is no longer the stable, secure place she thought it was. I like Shay a lot, and had a lot of empathy for her.

However, I did feel that this book suffered a little from the fact that we only got Shay’s point of view. Dominic is relatively reserved and doesn’t always give clues as to what he is thinking or feeling, so he remains somewhat mysterious throughout, making this very much Shay’s story, not Shay and Dominic’s romance. Since I liked what we did see of Dominic very much, this was rather disappointing.

One thing that is very clear, however, is that the early antipathy between Shay and Dominic, while not entirely one-sided, does seem to be driven mostly by Shay. There are hints from the start that Dominic quite likes her, and may even be slightly attracted to her, but Shay chooses not to notice these things – possibly because she is very attracted to him in return, and doesn’t like that one bit. Shay has decided that Dominic looks down on her because of his advanced degree and interest in hard news, and so in the early part of the book she filters everything he says through that lens.

Of course, once she realises that this is not the case, things heat up pretty quickly. Here they are, recording part of the show at a romantic Dark Dinner experience:

After we polish off the pomegranate soup, Nathaniel returns with the final course. “These are handcrafted dark chocolate cherry truffles.” He pauses. “We always encourage the couple to feed each other.”

“Oh, we’re not a couple,” I say.

“You must have the full experience,” he insists.

“We should do what the man says,” Dominic says, and louder, as though making sure the mic catches this: “Let the record show that Shay Goldstein did not want my hands anywhere near her mouth.”

“I have no problem with your hands near my mouth. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever put there,” I say sweetly.

“Too racy for public radio,” Dominic says with a cluck of his tongue.

“Shay, go ahead,” Nathaniel says, sounding as though he’s trying to hold in a laugh.

My hand stumbles around on the table before I find one of the truffles. It’s bite-size, but probably deathly rich. “The airplane is preparing for landing,” I say as I bring it up to where I imagine Dominic’s mouth is.

“Ah yes, nothing more romantic than imagining you’re feeding a picky child,” he says, and I must press the chocolate into the side of his face because he adds, “Runway’s a little to the left.”

Carefully, I maneuver it across his stubbled cheek and over to his mouth. There. He parts his lips to take a small bite, his teeth grazing my fingers. And oh my god, that is a feeling I’ve never before experienced during dinner. His lips are so smooth, contrasted with the roughness of his cheek, and I can feel the chocolate melting on my fingertips.

“Sorry,” he says in a scratchy voice that makes my hand wobble against his mouth and my heart do something similar inside my chest. “God, that’s phenomenal.”

Another thing I enjoyed about this story was the way it was just very slightly unconventional in its approach to relationships. Shay is five years older than Dominic, and also, as it turns out, considerably more sexually experienced than he is (fear not, he’s still good in the sack). Shay’s mother is the one who proposes to her boyfriend, not vice versa. Similarly, the characters are from diverse backgrounds and have diverse sexualities, but this is not dwelt on; Shay muses on how different Passover is with a large family; Ruthie, Shay’s producer, breaks up with a guy she is dating early in the book, and later her new girlfriend helps out with food in a crisis; and while Dominic does mention once or twice the racism he has faced as a Korean-American, it’s not the focus of his story.

For me, this made the story feel very grounded in the real world, and also gently subversive, which I liked a lot.

I also loved the book’s clear passion for public radio:

“Why radio, though?”

“I like the idea of being able to talk directly to people. There’s a real power to your words when they’re not backed up by visuals. It’s personal. You’re fully in control of how you sound, and it’s almost like you’re telling a story to just one person.”

“Even if hundreds or thousands are listening,” I say, quietly. “Yeah. I get that. I really do.”

… and now I find myself with a sudden urge to find out whether this is available as an audiobook, and I don’t even *like* audiobooks, but I bet this would work spectacularly in that format.

Unfortunately, there were a few things that didn’t work so well for me. I’ve mentioned the casual sexism from Kent, Dominic and Shay’s boss, which only gets worse and more overt as the book progresses. It was real nails down a chalkboard stuff. But my biggest issue was one of tone and pacing.

Up until about the 70% mark, this was a lovely, fun, romantic comedy, but then things started to go downhill. It was one distressing situation after another, on nearly every front – romantic, professional and social – and every time we recovered from one Black Moment we were plunged into a new, more painful one. This made the last third of the book quite hard going. To be fair, I am a reader with a very low tolerance for angst, but three Black Moments was far too many for me.

And then everything wrapped up quite fast at the end, so there wasn’t a lot of time in which to enjoy the happy ever after, and to believe that everything was resolved. This is not to say I wasn’t convinced by the romance – I definitely was! – but I didn’t finish the book with that good-book-noise sigh. In fact, I was still feeling sad and shaken at the end of the story. Perhaps it was simply that with so many bad things happening in a row, I wasn’t able to convince myself that there wasn’t something else lurking around the corner, waiting to make things sad again. Certainly, after five chapters of absolute misery, I needed more than half a chapter and an epilogue of things getting better to have faith that the happy ever after was going to stick.

On reflection, this is another way in which the story would have been served well by giving Dominic some point of view chapters. Because when things go to hell, Dominic reacts very poorly in the moment, for reasons that are very understandable – and then he makes a choice which, from the outside, looks like an utter betrayal of Shay and of their relationship. Frankly, I wasn’t thrilled with it even once he explained his reasoning, but at least if we had been in his head we could have seen that he was doing the best he could with what he had, rather than being a colossal jerk.

Not knowing what was going on with Dominic exacerbated the pacing issue, too, because we were left assuming, with Shay, that he had behaved incredibly badly – it’s hard to turn that around quickly. Seeing more of Dominic’s viewpoint could still have unleashed plenty of angst (oh, the heartbreak! the remorse!), but it would have made it easier to settle into the happy ending.

So, yet again, I find myself with a book that is difficult to grade, because The Ex Talk did a lot of things really well. There was some lovely writing, some fantastic banter, and I really did like Shay and Dominic together. They had terrific chemistry and the sort of teasing relationship that makes me very happy, because it means there is a firm foundation of friendship underneath the romance. For the first 70% or so of the book, I was having a wonderful time. But then we descended into seemingly endless angst, and it was just too much. For me, the whole point of reading a romance is that you finish the story with a smile on your face, and that didn’t happen here. I’m giving this one a B minus.