Harper Ellison★ Sage · Lv 7
todayThe banter, the pining, the grumpy professor. Exactly the comfort read I needed.
Romance
The Love Hypothesis
4.9· 1,439 ratings
Published 2021398 pagesEnglishCharming · Steamy
The universe wants us together, Olive. It's willing to break the laws of thermodynamics for us.
Why read it
To convince her best friend she has a thriving love life, a third-year PhD candidate grabs the nearest man in the hallway and kisses him, only to discover she has just planted one on the most notoriously unapproachable young professor in the department.
The premise
Olive Smith needs a fake boyfriend, and to her shock the brilliant, standoffish biology professor Adam Carlsen agrees to play the part, because a fake relationship happens to solve a problem of his own. Their bargain forces two guarded academics into pretend dates and staged affection, and the closer they get, the harder it becomes to remember which parts were supposed to be an experiment.
The story behind it
Ali Hazelwood, a neuroscience professor, wrote The Love Hypothesis after years of writing fan fiction, and the manuscript's roots in that community are well documented. Published by Berkley in 2021, it became a runaway New York Times bestseller and helped launch a wave of STEM-set contemporary romance.
What awaits inside
- 01
The fake arrangement
What awaits is a bargain that gives each party cover for a separate problem, then quietly stops feeling fake.
- 02
Women in science
Olive's real stakes, a pancreatic-cancer research project and a hostile field, ground the romance in the pressures of being a woman in STEM.
- 03
The misread man
Adam's reputation as cold and cruel unravels as Olive learns how badly the department has misjudged him.
- 04
A dangerous mentor
A predatory colleague turns the lighthearted setup into something with real menace and real consequences.
From the book
The opening hallway kiss, when Olive impulsively grabs and kisses Adam to fool her friend Anh.
The conference in Boston where the fake relationship is tested in public and Olive confronts a colleague who crosses a line.
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