Review: "See You at the Summit" by Jordyn Taylor

See You at the Summit by Jordyn Taylor
Published January 2026 via Gallery Books
★★★

Simone is finally out of the closet and ready to live her best bi life—new job at a gay museum, new coming-out post, new clothes, new...boyfriend? That wasn't part of the plan.

I picked this up for, well, the hook. Bi erasure is well documented, and the struggle to portray bi characters well comes in numerous forms—you get side characters in books who seem like they're bi for the sake of diversity; you get main characters who are bi in a "realized she was bi in college and this book is all about her het relationship" way; you get main characters who are bi in a "realized she was bi in college and this book is all about her queer relationship" way; and on it goes. I know there's a lot out there that I haven't read, but in my reading at least it's been really rare to see the sort of thing that Simone struggles with throughout the book: that now that she's bi, she doesn't feel queer enough if she's dating a man; moreover, some people around her think that she's only bi if she's dating a woman. It's a little unsubtle in See You at the Summit (Simone is trying really hard to embody "messy bisexual"), but I can't mind that much because it's the sort of thing that I want to see more characters talking about openly. It's something that I thought about a fair amount when I took up with a man, actually; in many ways it feels as though, in doing so, I exited the queer community, even though I'm as queer as ever. The difference between me and Simone (erm...one of several) is that I'd been well and truly out for years by then, and had dated people across the gender spectrum, and had gotten over any need I might have felt to establish...I don't know...queer cred.

Plot-wise, the book is kind of divided in three conflicts—first there's Simone's feud with Ryan (more on that in a moment); then there's Simone's internal struggle to see herself as queer enough (fueled by some family drama); then there's a separate biphobia plot. It's valuable to have both the second and the third plotlines in terms of exploring the bi erasure theme; we see how that affects Simone both inside and outside of the queer community. I think I would have liked a little more overlap, though, as I kept checking how far along I was because it seemed like everything was wrapping up, only to find that there was plenty of book left (telling me that there must be another conflict just around the corner).

Character-wise, I found Ryan easier to take than Simone. They have a rocky start: Simone has one of many her-flaw-is-clumsiness moments (combined with the terrible choice of timing her coming-out for just hours before her first day on the job, despite knowing that coming out will be incredibly stressful and that her mother will react badly) and damages something Ryan has been working on for weeks...plus injures him slightly, plus dumps coffee all over him. Ryan's reaction is unnecessarily rude, but his frustration makes some sense. And to her credit, Simone feels awful and tries to apologize...but when Ryan doesn't immediately accept her apology, she decides that he's her work nemesis (and complains about him, repeatedly, to their mutual coworkers, which is not a great look ever, but especially in the first couple of weeks of a new job?) and then decides to kill him with the fakest kindness she can summon. By then she's decided that everything's his fault anyway, so when he doesn't fall over himself to apologize for being a grump (Simone thinks she's the sunniest sun that ever did shine), she resorts to things like having an intensely personal phone call, in which she recounts her less-than-sunshine-and-rainbows coming-out experience, while Ryan is a captive audience...and then gets huffy because Ryan doesn't fall all over himself to express his condolences for the stuff in the conversation she subjected him to.

Things get better from there, at least for a while. But I really struggled to get past Simone's early-book brattiness (especially when she then keeps needling Ryan about how he was soooo mean to her at first). In a romance featuring a queer lead, I never want the bulk of my sympathy to go to the straight man. It's not the last time she makes herself into the victim, and it's just not always that fun to be stuck in her POV.

All of this is an unnecessarily long way of saying that I love the intent here; I love the themes; I don't love the characters. I don't know how marketing people envision their target readers, but for this one I'm going to imagine the target reader as a cis-woman in her late teens or early twenties who self-identifies as a bisexual disaster, emphasis on disaster. (I knew someone once who talked a huge game about how much she hated drama, all the while being one of the most dramatic people I knew. We did not stay in touch. She and Simone would get along great right up until the point that they had a gigantic, messy falling-out.)

Tropes: #EnemiesToLovers, #BisexualDisaster, #OneBed, #GrumpyAndFauxSunshine #HerFatalFlawIsThatShe'sClumsyAndKeepsFallingIntoHisArms

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.