Review: Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she’s an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs.

Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down. Because Jack Smith, the annoyingly attractive and broody older brother of her favorite client, turns out to be the cold-hearted experimental physicist who ruined her mentor’s career and undermined the reputation of theorists everywhere. And that same Jack who now sits on the hiring committee at MIT, right between Elsie and her dream job.

Elsie is prepared for an all-out war of scholarly sabotage but…those long, penetrating looks? Not having to be anything other than her true self when she’s with him? Will falling into an experimentalist’s orbit finally tempt her to put her most guarded theories on love into practice?

Love, Theoretically was a good enough read but my least favorite between it and Ali Hazelwood’s other novels. It was fine to read once and I did enjoy myself for the most part but it’s not reread-worthy. I think I enjoyed the cute hedgehog and the Twilight fangirling more than the actually characters at times.

I’m just gonna jump in and right away say that I wasn’t a fan of the romance, which kind of sucked since this is a romance novel. I didn’t feel any chemistry at all between Elsie and Jack. I’ll even go as far as to say that I liked them better before they started dating. It never really felt like Elsie really liked Jack even all that much. So yeah, wasn’t a fan of them as a couple.

What I did enjoy were the hilarious and nerdy moments, especially when Jack was figuring out if Elsie was somehow deceiving his brother Greg (which Elsie was fake-dating). Also loved the hedgehog appearances of Elsie’s roommate’s hedgehog. Although we didn’t see him quite as much after the first few chapters? And then there were the Twilight references. As a Twilight fan myself I really loved those so a lot.

The academic setting, as always, was really great to read about, since I don’t know anything about science academics at all. I just wished I had liked the main characters a bit more and hadn’t felt so flat to me. The spicy moments weren’t all that either. I think I can just summarize everything with: I’ve read better from this author but this book had some good moments, nonetheless.

About the author:

Ali Hazelwoodis the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis, as well as a writer of peer-reviewed articles about brain science, in which no one makes out and the ever after is not always happy. Originally from Italy, she lived in Germany and Japan before moving to the US to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. When Ali is not at work, she can be found running, eating cake pops, or watching sci-fi movies with her three feline overlords (and her slightly-less-feline husband).

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