I added The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood to my digital ARC shelf a few months ago, solely based on the cover. I kinda forgot about it in the overwhelming nature of how many books are on said shelf until it started popping up in my socials, and I jumped into reading it for myself.
The buzz is pretty spot on with this one.
The Love Hypothesis introduces us to Olive when she’s at a pretty tough place in her life. She’s hiding in a bathroom, kinda crying, and trying to figure out if she should continue her academic career or move on. That’s when a man finds her and asks why she’s crying in his bathroom. She blames it on expired contacts and they have a conversation about the why of pursuing science that helps her decide to keep going.
Flash forward two years, she’s thought about that blurry guy often as she’s still doing postdoc work. Her best friend Ahn wants to date a guy Olive has gone out with, but won’t because Ahn thinks Olive still likes Jeremy. Olive lies and says she has a date, only to run into Ahn in the lab. In a panic, she kisses Dr. Adam Carlsen as a cover, which grows into the lie that they are dating. They are each getting a little benefit of the deal and only hanging out for 10 minutes a week at Starbucks… until they aren’t.
To the surprise of no one, Olive catches feelings for Adam and expands the lie to keep things on track for what they want of the fake dating situation. However, Adam has his own side of this story as well, but a lack of communication turns it into a little bit of a dramatic time.
I enjoyed The Love Hypothesis quite a bit. It’s a shade below Christina Lauren’s science-y romance The Soulmate Equation for me, but still solid. My main issues with it are grammatical errors (which I hope will be corrected between the ARC edition I read and the version hitting shelves), an overuse of the word ‘very’, and the repeated comments about the situation being a rom-com trope (we knowwwww. Move on!). Those slight annoyances weren’t enough to slow me down, and I plowed through this one in a day. There is a decent amount of science-y words in this novel, but most of it is skimmable and not crucial to understand what’s going on.
Literary HypeWoman 