The Love Hypothesis

Hi! Welcome to the August episode on The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. This novel came out in 2021 and it has not stopped gaining popularity since then. Amazon Prime is releasing the movie version this month, so I thought, what better time to review this than now?

I had low expectations going into it because these types of romance novels are not my type. There are a lot of tropes like the sunshine x grumpy couple, an age gap, fake dating, and forced proximity. Since then, the author has been publishing romance books on the regular. It hasn’t won notable awards. But it sure has won the hearts of many fans.

For those unfamiliar with the plot, The Love Hypothesis follows Olive, a PhD student who pretends to be dating Adam, a lab professor to help her friend’s love life.

I’m not sure what she expected to come out of fake dating Kylo Ren as an attractive scientist.

You can obviously guess where the story is going and that Olive and Adam will catch feelings for each other. I already don’t endorse this based on the immediately apparent power dynamic. While Adam is not directly Olive’s supervisor, he still has a lot of sway within the department and at the university. I also find it unrealistic how they got together in the first place. I don’t think in real life, a student kissing a professor would make him agree to fake date her. It would either be reported, ignored, or he would abuse her in some way. This is why I also made the assumption that Adam liked Olive from the start. No professional would entertain this idea. I found that the characters and especially Olive cuss a lot and quite without reason. A lot of it is surrounding her falling for Adam. I’m not sure what she expected to come out of fake dating Kylo Ren as an attractive scientist. Because yes, this whole story is a Star Wars fan fic of Kylo Ren. Olive is cussing the entire world over the complications of her arrangement with Adam. This girl needs to chill. The school is ok with it, people around her are actually treating her better so I don’t see the reason to catastrophize this whole thing. And while she loves to panic, she also loves to repress her feelings and not tell Adam she really likes him. Even after their deadline to stop fake dating. Ouf. That was a lot. I wanted to get the negative aspects out of the way to that you can get a realistic expectation of what’s in the book. This novel has receives such high praise on social media and there are not a lot of bad details listed to contrast what was great about it. In my opinion, the only couple that properly pulled off fake dating was Lara Jean and Peter from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han. That was the hype train to get on back in 2018 and it still remains true to this day.

Ali Hazelwood being from the scientific community, she brought so much life and accuracy in her characters.

Now for the good parts. Ali Hazelwood being from the scientific community, she brought so much life and accuracy in her characters. It really felt like they know what they were talking about and that it was real scientific research being conducted. We got to see the life behind this research and while I am in no position to say if it was executed correctly, I can say that it felt real. The highs and the lows and not just a glossed up version. Sometimes, you know you can kinda spot a fake thing where clearly the author has no idea what they are doing, but not in this case. So hats off to Hazelhood. The author also added a traumatic event for Olive and I like the way she made the character process it. It felt like how people with this trauma deal with it in real life. I do wish Olive would have leaned on Adam for more support regarding this, but nonetheless, it was well done.

All in all, this was an ok novel. It’s not my type and I will probably not be reading more of Ali Hazelwood, especially after I saw an Instagram post detailing the level of sexual content in her other books. It was not as bad as I believed it would be, but it would have used some tweaking. Will I be watching the Prime movie coming later this month? Yes, yes I will, if only to judge the execution.

Until next time, keep exploring those pages!