The Love Hypothesis(Book Review)

 

Penguin Random House|2021

Love stories, romcom, hypothesis, academia, steamy

❗don't read this if you are not 18

332 pages

28 chapters

Adorkable  meets To all the boys I have ever loved and science… Since I don't really know lots of romcoms about people in science, I don't even know any at all.

Olive Smith, is a third year PhD student,making a study on pancreatic Cancer. She is not the regular nerd, she likes watching romcom and sharing Netflix logins with her buddies. She has a Canadian sweet tooth.

   To convince her friend Anh that she was over her ex, she lies to her about going on a date one night, and to make it even more realistic, she kisses the first man she sees in a hurry, which is like a dumb idea , but well we are in romcom world, so….

The man happens to be Adam Carlsen. Hot, tyrant professor, who was known to be brutal with his student, not violently though. Olive Smith  convinced Adam to start fake dating her in order to convince Anh that she could date her ex boyfriend who she is totally over. But well, the little experiment goes wild. 

     Ali Hazelwood… Thank you for writing a  romcom that is different and that is inspiring. And steamy!!!! Frankly I didn't expect this book to be spicy but well it was, not all of it that the steaminess overshadows the writing and all. But yeah it was a nice read. It was exactly a page turner, but I remember taking reading it when I was supposed to be working. 

The trope is quite common, Grumpy meets sunshine, fake dating, boy falls first but the girl doesn't know so she thinks she fell first. Sigh. But it was still adorable to read. The fact that it was set in academia made it more appealing. I have always wanted something different like this. And it is worth all of the book tok  , booktube, and bookatagramm hype. You should read it really, even if you don't like romcoms. 

I found some parts boring and well silly, but overall it was quick to read, although not exactly a page turner.

And then the steamy and spicy scenes were good. Although I didn't expect that, really. It was surprising. Although it felt a little bit disjointed from the book. There were two parts, the awkward part, the adorable parts, and the steamy parts. Do you understand?

I liked the writing style, it was witty and simple. I liked the little hypothesis section for every chapter which was totally funny, reading the hypothesis for every chapter didn't give me information about the chapters, but made me curious to read the chapter.

     But...one thing which turned me off was that I didn't get to have enough information about Olive. Fine, she has a sweet tooth.  She was in the Canadian child care system or whatever. She must have gone through quite a lot. With her mum dying and her mum unavailable. Having to live with one foster parent or another. But she never talks about it, except in her interview, where she is forced to talk about her mother, and it was just once she mentioned her mother to Adam. None of the foster parents took a liking to her? Her mother doesn't have a family? It was like she was nobody apart from Anh  and Malcolm, her besides and eventually Adam Carlsen.(This is not a spoiler yuuno, considering the fact that you already know that the main characters always end up together in the end 90% of the time… ha)

She didn't even think or reminisce about Canada for once.. Oh..I think she did, she mentioned something about missing the snow.  But really, does this show that she has not fully healed from her mother's death or Hazelwood didn't really care about the character's background? Many stories from Adam's childhood surfaced and even what his parents were like.

  Also….the feminist side of me just had to point this out. Love Hypothesis follows the general pattern of making the woman less fortunate,less brainy, less strong than the man or totally helpless.

Let's see:

Adam is rich, and Olive is not

Adam is a Professor but Olive is not

Adam's parents are diplomats, Olive's parents are totally nameless for the whole of the book.

Sigh.  

It was still fun to read though, that's why I reviewed it. And isn't the cover totally cute??

I give it a 16/20?