BOOK REVIEW: THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS

 

 

Hi, everyone! Have you ever heard of the New York Time bestselling “The Love Hypothesis”? It is a rom-com that became very popular on BookTok, which is a sub-community of TikTok,  focusing on literature and books,  where people discuss and review what they have read through their Tik Tok. I have just finished it and I really loved its plot and style. It is  funny, light and lovely. If you enjoy romance as much as I do, you must read it!

THE PLOT

 

The plot of this rom-com is based on the fake dating between the two main characters, Olive and Adam, which brings them both benefits. Olive Smith is a very romantic person who has seen lots and lots of rom-coms, but she has never had a boyfriend because she doesn’t want any distraction from her experiments as a third-year Ph.D. candidate. Instead, her friend Anh wants to go out with Olive’s ex-crush, Jeremy, but she doesn’t want to break the rules of her friendship with Olive, who doesn’t care about her and Jeremy, anyway. So Olive decides to convince Anh that she is now dating and this brings her to a very embarrassing situation. One night she told her friend that she had a date, but it was just a lie, she was at work on her experiment that evening. But, when Olive sees Anh in the hallways, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen,  the university's most hated professor . The plan works, but this leads them into a fake relationship. What if she changes her mind and starts to feel something for him?

THE AUTHOR,  ALI HAZELWOOD

 

Ali Hazelwood was born and raised in Italy; she lived in Japan and America and then moved to the UK for her Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Today she is a neuroscience professor and a rom-com writer, she writes  about women in STEM and in academia. She started to write love stories thanks to fan fictions’ writers that inspired her and the Star Trek and Star Wars/Reylo ’s fans,  who encouraged her. Her first novel The love hypothesis, published in 2021, became really popular,  a New York Time best seller. She published her second book, Love on the Brain, in 2022 and on 13 June this year her third book is coming out, Love, theatrically.

As Ali Hazelwood told us in the last pages of the book,  in her annotations, she wrote about the STEM field, because it is the only environment that she really knows. In her books she gave us a thorough description of academia and related issues for men and women in it.  Part of the  situations and issues she describes are real problems she had to cope with personally. There are very few books that talks about women in STEM, Ali Hazelwood’s ones have the aim to describe these women and their love stories, in order to make us understand this world better.

MY MUSINGS

Reading this book, I could understand the academic world much better and it was great to figure out what life may be like for a female researcher,  since I dream of becoming one in the future. I loved the female characters and I felt at home while reading the book.  It may sound really stupid,  but I think that a lot of STEM girls, while reading it,  found that world even more fascinating and could relate to Olive.

Giorgia M, 4sc