Introduction
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, is everything you could expect from a cute, fake dating, enemies to lovers romance novel, published in September 2021, it has become a fan favorite for a quick warm romance story. Ali Hazelwood especially gained a lot of respect for this novel in particular as the main female character is a woman within STEM which isn’t widely represented within books or media much in the present day.
Storyline/ plot
We are first introduced to our main female character, Olive, as she prepares for her interview at Stanford university to become a PHD student, where she unexpectedly runs into one of the supposed students already there. Their meeting was brief but stuck with Olive for the duration of her interview and throughout her time at Stanford.
Fast forward a few years Olive is hard at work achieving her research goals whilst also trying to convince her best friend that she is completely over a boy she went on one date with and fully gives her friend her blessing to date this boy. In order to prove this to her friend Olive decides to tell her best friend she is on a date, sneak off to her lab to do some work and her best friend will never know…Until she walks around the corner, sees Olive isn’t actually on a date forcing Olive to kiss the closest person to her.
If that wasn’t bad enough the person Olive happened to kiss was none other than professor, Adam Carlson.
Overall this seems like the most embarrassing and awful thing Olive has ever done, but atleast best friend Anh now believes she is dating someone new. But now Anh has seen Olive kiss Adam, they pair have to come up with a solution to keep Anh happy and to make it look like Olive has a new boyfriend. The two scientists decide that fake dating would be much easier for both of them than telling the truth, what could go wrong?
With their fake relationship starting off a little rougher than intended the pair soon develop a strong liking to each other to the point it doesn’t feel like they are faking their relationship anymore…
Writing style
Overall Ali Hazelwood is really good at creating realistic character dynamics and so the relationships between them make sense, which is nice to have a couple who actually suit each other. Her storylines also flow really well which makes her books easy to read as it has a good pace and every scene leads on from the last really well so the overall feel of the story is the same the whole way through which makes it nice to read. I also really enjoyed the character descriptions and how it felt i could create a clear image of them in my head, apart from the repetition of size difference, I did feel that was unnecessary.
Pros/ cons
Overall I did like this book, the character dynamics were written really well and the relationships between the characters were clear and wholesome and really added to the story. I did think the descriptions of the scenes and the characters were nice but I didn’t enjoy the repetition of the size difference between Olive and Adam, it felt a little cringey at times with how much the size difference was a main focus. I did enjoy the story overall. I thought it was cute, easy to read and a good pace but, I did sometimes grow a little bored and it just wasn’t really holding my interest as much as previous romance books have.
Conclusion
Overall I gave this book three stars, not because it was a bad book but because it wasn’t great either, for me it was very predictable and some of the situations the characters were put in sometimes were a bit cheesy. I can definitely understand why a lot of people enjoy this book, and I understand why a lot of people love this story, but for me it was good but not great and it isn’t something I can see myself reaching for again.