Review: "The Love Hypothesis" by Ali Hazelwood ★★★★★

Review: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

I cannot believe I did not get around to reading this sooner: this has been the best contemporary romance I have read since Tarah Dewitt and Abby Jimenez! This slowburn, grumpy meets sunshine, he falls first, fake-dating, age-gap romance is full of so, so much humour and heart that this story will be in my head for so long it should start paying rent.

“I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.” Maybe it was the words, or maybe the tone. Maybe it was the way he’d just told her something about himself, or how he’d taken her hand earlier and saved her from her misery. Her knight in black armour. Maybe it was none of it, maybe it was all of it, maybe it was always going to happen.

PLOT SUMMARY
26-year-old Olive Smith is a third-year biology P.h.D. graduate at Stanford University with the dream of helping detect pancreatic cancer early, due to losing her mother to this disease. Her dating life is non-existent as she spends all her time researching, and her best friend Anh Pham really likes Olive’s ex-boyfriend Jeremy but does not want to ruin their friendship by dating him. To let her know it is fine, Olive tells her she is actually dating someone else (though she isn’t) and will be on a date that night.

When she encounters Anh that night at the university, she panics, grabs the first student she sees, and kisses him – except, to her utter mortification, she finds she has smooched none other than 34-year-old “antagonistic and unapproachable” tall, dark and handsome Dr. Adam Carlsen. This is a man all students loathe for his grumpy nature and unmerciful criticism of work. And now he is her fake boyfriend.

The situation will help Olive convince Anh to go out with Jeremy (and get students who are bothering her off her back) and will help Adam get his research funds released (the department believes he is going to work elsewhere so sees no point in furthering his career). They agree to do this until September 29th when he should get his funding. What can possibly go wrong? Surely not actually falling in love with Adam and all his surprisingly tender, goofy ways.

This is told from the first-person past-tense narrative of Olive.

oh wouldn’t that be funny? About as funny as a Greek tragedy.

OVERALL OPINIONS
When finding out that Ali works in academia and is all she has ever known, I could see it the moment she says Olive’s report was “thirty-four pages single-spaced, Arial (11 point), no justification”. In women in STEM, we trust. While I cannot speak on the accuracy of what she has said about students in biology and its struggles with funding and equipment, as someone who studied Computer Science, I really really relate to and appreciate the struggles of Women in Science addressed in this book. In the male-dominated subject, my classes at university had about a handful of women – if that. This spoke to me. Ali was so real for that! Also, thank you for turning out so many stories of women in STEM. I feel this is underrated and needed.

Ali Hazelwood has such a flair for her writing that I did not want to put this down. In fact, I got up today with the expressed intention of finishing this – really, I was immediately like “I need to finish this”, I need to find out what happened next, I needed to finish this story. The plot itself was predictable but by no means is that a bad thing, especially for a romance. I was really waiting on Olive to realise she had recorded that incident after her talk.

This story was hilarious! I was genuinely laughing a lot throughout – my favourite has to be when the students find out Olive is dating Adam and everyone is super nice to her for fear of Adam hearing about it haha. I like that Olive’s friend Malcolm hates Adam due to his not-so-constructive criticism of Malcolm’s work and then by the end of it they bond over their hatred of pumpkin spice! And when Olive gets a fright because Adam is sitting in the break room in the dark.

Its humour reminded me in many ways of Emily Henry, though she has a very distinct style (with comparisons or incorporated media references as funny descriptions). The writing style itself is like both Tarah Dewitt and Abbey Jimenez as she covers romance along with some very serious elements. Here we have Olive dealing with grief of her mother’s death, her fear of getting too close to people, and harassment in the workplace.

I like the definition of hypothesis as part of the epigraph. It is such a funny yet clever way of introducing all the themes of the book.

hy∙poth∙e∙sis (noun)
A superstition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence, as a starting point for further investigation.
Example: “Based on the available information and the data hitherto collected, my hypothesis is that the farther away I stay from love, the better off I will be.”

As the chapters go on, there are various notes for the love hypothesis from Olive herself relating to whatever happens in the chapter. I really liked this element.

<< Positives >>
🠚Olive and Adam’s characters. They complement each other so well. Introvert meets extravert, grumpy meets sunshine. It’s too good! I love the way Olive really makes Adam come out his shell, show his softer side. There was so much chemistry, they should be studying it instead of biology hehe.
🠚The spice was so sensual and well worth the wait. I loved it!
🠚I love both Holden and Malcolm. Holden is lovely and is just the sort of best friend of a boyfriend that you could ask for. And I love Malcolm’s whole vibe and how supportive he is to Olive too.
🠚Raising awareness of asexuals and providing representation for them. My own friend considered herself asexual for a long while and, in very similar ways to Olive, found that when she had the right emotional connection to someone, she was attracted to them. This is, of course, one example of many so I understand if others do not feel the same way but, for me, I feel this was done well here.

<< Negatives >>
🠚While the recurring jokes between Olive and Adam are hilarious, maybe not all the teasing about Title IX sat well with me, especially when Olive herself has to use it eventually to file a complaint about Tom – though, I suppose therein lies the irony. Of course, Adam has loved Olive for years so he was never going to file a complaint – and some of the jokes were hilarious like the “under SPF pretense” sunscreen incident, I did giggle at some of the phrasing – but still, yeah.
🠚When we finally got the spice moment, I really did not want it to be the same day as Tom doing *that* to poor Olive. No, thank you. Honestly, I would have been too traumatised to do it – I would have thought of his words of “you screwed him to get to where you are” thing.
🠚Anh was really, really annoying. I really hated how she kept forcing Olive into doing stuff with Adam from kissing him to sitting on his lap to sunscreen. I hate people who peer-pressure like that. And then she is like “I wanted you to know that you could express your feelings if you wanted to–I really thought I was helping you” – girl, please, it is not helpful!

CHARACTERS
-ˋˏ ꒰ Olive꒱ ˎˊ-
↳ When I tell you I see a lot of myself in Olive I mean it. I can really ramble and I loathe public speaking. I feel like Elena Armas tried to make Josie Moore from The Fiancé Dilemma but she was far more annoying.
🠚She is so kind and selfless – and because of her nature it is the reason why she is in such a mess, first by getting into the fake dating, then when she does not want to tell Adam about the harassment and ruin his friendship with Tom.
🠚Like a proton, Olive stays positive. Even in the most difficult times like with Tom she was like “it was actually a very, *very* backhanded compliment”. I absolutely admire that and I try to do the same!

She was fine. This was fine. She could cry about this later.

-ˋˏ ꒰ Adam꒱ ˎˊ-
↳ Black is the new green apparently because he is one huge green flag. He is one of my favourite book boyfriends I think I have read in a while. I really like sympathetic, protective guys who are so attentive and listen. He is so ideal.
🠚The way he shows his softer side to Olive and is very encouraging to her. Even recounts his own horrible student life to relate to her and allow her to see that she can do anything she puts her mind to. Like aww! I like that “smart-ass” is a recurring remark that he calls Olive. The number of things he does is endearing, like offering to give her a lift home, asking her the right questions to keep her calm during her pitch, ordering a Pumpkin Pie Frappuccino on his trip and sending a pic to Olive, telling jokes to make her laugh.
🠚Also, bless him for not wanting to take advantage of her and also because that he thinks she is in love with someone else! I do hate miscommunication because I just want to scream at the two of them haha.
🠚“I want to. I said I did” “It doesn’t matter what you said. You can always change your mind.” – GREEN FLAGS, GREEN FLAGS!

“He’s a tall, broody, sullen hunk with a genius IQ. Everyone likes tall, broody, sullen hunks with genius IQs.”

FAV QUOTES
• “she told… Jeremy. And he told everyone, and now everyone knows. Or they think they know, even though there’s absolutely nothing to know. As you and I know.”
• He’d probably whacked someone on the head with a microscope for mislabeling peptide samples.
• He was smiling, staring at her with a strange light in his eyes. And would you look at that: Adam Carlsen had dimples. Cute ones.
• Fake dating. Adam Carlsen. Olive would have to be a lunatic.
• a metal plaque that read: Adam J. Carlsen, Ph.D. Maybe the J. stood for “Jackass”.
• She was going to be jailed for bestfriendicide, and she was okay with it.
• “Perfect. I’ll bring a counterfeit marriage certificate to casually drop at his feet.”
• “I shouldn’t talk about this.” “Why?” “Because…It makes me weepy.” He smiled. “Olive, you can talk about it. And you should let yourself be weepy.”
• “Perhaps rumors of your cruelty have been greatly exaggerated.” His mouth twitched. “Maybe you just pull out the best in me?”
• Olive had felt that he was on her side. Over & over, & in ways that could never have anticipated, he had made her feel unjudged. Less alone.
• It wasn’t their first kiss, but it was the first kiss that was *theirs*
• Adam had no idea. He actually wanted to protect her, when all Olive wanted was… to protect him.
• Maybe her life was nothing but a little sob story, but it was *her* little sob story. Her heart may be broken, but her brain was doing just fine.
• “I’m going to kill you,” he gritted out, little more than a growl. “If you say another word about the woman I love, if you look at her, if you even *think* about her–I’m going to *fucking* kill you.”
• Adam ignored him, and everyone else. He headed straight for Olive, and– He cradled her head with both hands, fingers sliding through her hair and holding her tight as he lowered his forehead to hers. He was warm, and smelled like himself, like safe and home.
• You can fall in love: someone will catch you.