When reviewing Ali Hazelwood’s latest novel, Deep End, earlier this month, I expressed an interest in reading some of her other work and got a few recommendations. I’ve since picked up The Love Hypothesis, Love, Theoretically, Not in Love, and Love on the Brain.
The Love Hypothesis is about Olive, a biology grad student, and Adam, a professor (but not her professor). Olive briefly dates a boy who she isn’t very interested in (I think his name was Jeremy, but I honestly can’t remember, let’s just call him that), but she can sense a chemistry between him and her best friend, Anh. Anh is hesitant to date Jeremy as she doesn’t want to hurt Olive, even though Olive insists it’s fine. To convince Anh that she’s over Jeremy, she pretends to have a date. When she accidentally runs into Anh on the night of her supposed “date”, she panics a bit and asks a random man if she can kiss him where Anh can see it. The rando happens to be Adam, a professor with a bit of a curmudgeonly reputation in the department. Adam has his own reasons for wanting to seem attached, so they agree to pretend to be dating for a fixed time period. But as they spend more time together to continue the ruse, real feelings start to develop.
In Love, Theoretically, Elsie is an adjunct professor looking for a better job (there was a bunch of stuff about the different types of professors in academia, but I don’t know all of the complexities). For extra money on the side, she masquerades as a fake girlfriend, which is ideally suited to her people-pleasing skills. While interviewing for a new job, she comes to find out that her favorite client’s brother, Jack, is also the author of a paper that discredited her mentor and field years ago. But as they spend more time together, she realizes she might not hate him after all.
In Not in Love, Rue works for a food research company, Kline, and she loves her job. Then some corporate shenanigans occur, where a private equity firm acquires an interest Kline and makes moves to try to take control of the company from Rue’s boss and friend. One of the members of the private equity group is Eli, a man that Rue has previously met on a hookup app. Rue has to make choices between her growing attraction to Eli and her loyalty to her boss.
I read them in the order above, I’m not entirely sure what order they were meant to be read in, but I don’t think it super matters (Adam and Olive keep showing up in other books, but it’s not really plot relevant).
Overall, these were quick, enjoyable reads.
My favourite was definitely Not in Love. I liked that there was a dual-POV so we also got to see things from Eli’s perspective, and the corporate-espionage plot was well balanced with the romance plot. The Love Hypothesis was fun (although the set-up was a little convoluted), and the ridiculous situations that Olive was put into to continue the deception were funny and sexy (there’s a sunscreen incident I particularly liked). Love, Theoretically was my least favourite (although it wasn’t bad). I liked Elsie and related to her people-pleasing “I just want people to like me” attitude, but I found Jack and their relationship kind of boring.
While I enjoyed these books, they are starting to get sort of same-y (it’s probably partially my fault for reading four of them in a month). I do have Love on the Brain and want to read it, but I’ll probably wait a little while until the others are not so fresh in my mind.