Review: The Love Hypothesis
✨ Thank you to Tej (@readaholic19 on Instagram) for being an angel on earth and letting me borrow her ARC! 🥰✨
I finished The Love Hypothesis last night and I actually have no words. The only way I can describe how I felt after reading is to quote something from Ali Hazelwood’s acknowledgment page:
asgfgsfasdgfadg!!!!!
Listen, I read a lot of contemporary romance. It’s my comfort genre, the one that got me into romance in the first place. And I can truly say I can’t remember the last time I read a debut, set in academia, that was this absolutely perfect. The setting, the characters, the storyline. P E R F E C T.
The Love Hypothesis gave me allllll the swoon, all the tension, all the fake dating turned real feelings perfection. On top of that, it had some of my other favorite tropes: grumpy/sunshine, and forced proximity?! Please and thank you! I cried at one point, I loved these characters so hard. I’m so grateful to Tej for letting me read her copy so that I could hug it. If any book deserves to be hugged, it’s this one.
I’ve always loved romances set in college settings, but so rarely are they about characters getting graduate degrees. While I didn’t go as far as my Ph.D (...yet. MSW over here for now 🙋🏻♀️) I recognized so many of the feelings and thoughts Olive had. There’s something so relatable and real about her graduate experience. Olive and Adam are both so passionate about their research, this story is the ultimate in competency porn! I didn’t realize how badly I needed a STEM romance with a Ph.D candidate heroine until now.
It should be known after I saw so many reviews mentioning the cover looking like Reylo, I could only picture Adam Driver as Adam Carlsen 😂 and I definitely wasn’t mad at it! From the prologue I was sucked into their world at Stanford and it was everything I wanted and more. I love a grumpy, yet swoony, hero and Adam Carlsen fit this so well. He’s cranky to almost everyone, except Olive, and I loved it.
I loved how Hazelwood made it clear that Adam had no control over Olive’s Ph.D and that they were in different departments. There were implications to them fake dating, but he didn’t hold power over her. I need more romances like this set in academia immediately please!
The Love Hypothesis is a slow burn. Sure Olive and Adam kiss in the first chapter, but as relative strangers. But holy wow when the steam hits 🥵
If I could give The Love Hypothesis a million stars I would. Please do yourself a favor and preorder it! It doesn’t come out until 9/14 but it is so well worth the wait. Love, love, loved 💜 Kellisa
CW: Death of a parent, cancer, sexual harassment
[ID: Kellisa wears a dark red sweatshirt with the words Strong Female Protagonist written in white. She holds The Love Hypothesis in her left hand]