The Love Hypothesis: concluding my February romance spree

pleasure? here for it. cute fake-dating tropes? ok. Accurate scientific stuff (quickly flashing back to hypothesis testing, wet lab procedures, Ph.D. defences and seminar talks)? Those little details are 1000% the ones that made the book for me. and… starting each chapter with our girl Olive outlining a hypothesis, predicting what will happen next? What can I say? I’m intrigued.

The chemistry is just okie for me. I didn’t get how Olive sees Adam’s brooding as sexy; and I thought Olive could have been a bit more upfront. Adam was rude and unsympathetic, but through dipping my toes into the romance genre lately, I find that lots of men seem to have inferiority complexes and trust issues. Guess that makes characters more interesting, huh.

Our author Ali Hazelwood definitely has worked in a lab for a good amount of time to be able to so accurately capture some of the dynamics. When you are so focused on being an expert in a very small field, where you are the only expert in the world who understands something, you can feel “lonely, determined, helpless, scared, happy, cornered, inadequate, misunderstood, enthusiastic”, as Hazelwood shares herself. You can read this book exclusively as a romance, but the tiny shreds of relatability here bump the book to 4 stars from 3 for me. There are so many details (lab socials, cold emailing, networking, conferences) that hit the spot, explaining the difficulties of long Ph.D. dissertations and putting a spin on otherwise unexceptional events.