Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. Now, I know that I haven’t been posting a lot of reviews lately, but I am slowly trying to get back into it. Life simply tends to get in the way sometimes. SPOILER ALERT: This review has spoilers, so please read at your own discretion. Or if you have not read or finished the book yet, please don’t read at all. Trigger warning for death of a parent and sexual harrassment.
Okay. So…
I don’t know why, but contemporary romance isn’t doing it for me lately. I just can’t seem to fall in love with it. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood is probably one of the most popular contemporary romance novels of 2021, and I honestly don’t understand why. I’m probably one of the minority but I did not like this book. And I hate to say it, it was boring too. Let’s start, however, with what I did like about this book. The accurate portrayal of academia. This is spot-on, and it makes sense since the author herself says she is a scientist, and that academia is all she knows. I know it too; I was raised by a scientist, and he has worked in academia all his life. And my siblings and I are all scientists, albeit in different disciplines but one of them is (serendipitously) a molecular biologist, and I visited her (and her lab) several times during her graduate studies. I watched her work as hard as (I assume) Olive works in The Love Hypothesis, although we never actually see her work, you know? And this was one of my main issues with The Love Hypothesis; we are told a lot of things about the characters, but we never actually get to see them do things.
Like Olive and Adam’s fake-dating relationship. Before I go into that, though, pause. Olive is working on a project that could potentially give pancreatic cancer patients a new chance at life by coming up with a way to diagnose the disease sooner, at a stage where doctors might actually be able to do something about it. But one night, which later becomes The Night, while trying to avoid an embarrassing scene with her best friend Anh, Olive kisses some random guy in the hall. The guy she kisses though is Adam Carlson, the most hated professor of the faculty… a grade A ass. The said embarrassing scene is having to explain to Anh why she isn’t out on the date she said she had; the date she made up to encourage Anh to start dating Jeremy, Olive’s ex. For starters, this premise is unrealistic. Maybe this does happen (somewhere), but I’ve never known anyone who would actually do this, and it was a little hard for me to suspend my disbelief and believe that healthy romantic relationships begin this way. End of pause.
Okay. For some inexplicable reason, Adam decides to follow along with Olive’s charade and they start fake-dating. But the truth is, they never really sell it. They only meet once a week at a Starbucks so people can see them together, but their interactions during those weekly meetings don’t make you feel anything. I was expecting the author to show us how they slowly start falling for one another. But all they ever talk about (mostly) is how disgusting the drinks Olive orders are, and how Adam prefers to drink (and eat) healthy and healthier teas. This I did not like. The constant reminder of how they are complete opposites; she eats junk and disgusting food because she’s poor and can’t afford much else while he eats healthy food because he can afford to pay for it. Yes, graduate students don’t have a lot of money for luxuries, but I didn’t appreciate how we are constantly reminded of this fact page after page. The same is true about their physical complexion. She is thin and petite and (apparently) has a concave (what?) stomach while he is impossibly tall and big (even in bed, to the point where he doesn’t fit inside of her. Again, WTF?) But the worst part is that we are constantly reminded of this as well. “He’s so tall, he’s huge, he’s… (insert sleepy emoticon here).” Enough already! I get it. The man’s tall. Move on! Why do we need to be reminded about it 699 times? One time is fine. Two, okay. I did not like this, and frankly it made for some bad writing. I don’t understand why this book wasn’t edited better.
Somewhere I heard that this book was originally a fanfic for a TV couple that I don’t know. But if that couple is anything like these two, I don’t think I would like them either. There was just no chemistry between these two. And it was hard for me to actually root for them. I just couldn’t. I was so detached from them, and the author never gave me anything to connect with either one of them. But let’s start with Olive. Yes, she is a very smart woman and is working to beat pancreatic cancer, but all we got to see of her was how she makes one mishap after another due to her poor life choices. And those poor life choices just keep coming…and coming. And truth be told it got repetitive and boring. I also found that she was a bit shallow and airheaded (no offense to anyone) and had really pushy friends. Especially Anh. Wow. That woman is not a good friend.
But I guess that one of my main issues with Olive was that she is very insecure. Yes, she is 26 years old, and I understand that we are all insecure and still need to do some growing up at this age, but Olive is ridiculous. I didn’t appreciate that she thought she was sexually defective, or not normal, and that’s not a message you want to convey to young girls and women who read this book and just so happen to be discovering their own sexuality. Olive has a very negative perception about herself, and I didn’t like that about her. But my biggest issue was her jumping into bed with Adam right after Tom sexually harasses her. No woman is going to want to have sex after being harassed like that, it doesn’t matter how much you like the guy or not. It just doesn’t happen. And the book just went downhill from there.
Then there’s Adam. Adam is the typical mysterious, brooding, and moody romantic hero. And that’s it. There’s not much to his background, and the author doesn’t elaborate a whole lot. Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite romantic heroes are like this, but Adam is so poorly developed that he comes out as a very flat cardboard cutout character. There is absolutely no depth to him, and no explanation as to why he is so unapproachable. All we ever see is him being nice to Olive, and he had his moments. I wanted to know more about him, but there was nothing to hold on to and I found myself rather disillusioned at the end. And finally, the miscommunication! The amount of times that Olive or Adam made assumptions about one another was exhausting. Just talk to each other already! But where is the angst in that?
I do want to say that this review expresses my own opinions about this book, and that I don’t want to discourage you from reading it if you want to. The Love Hypothesis was just not the book for me, but it could have been so much better. I gave this book an I Did Not Like It At All rating.
