Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Steam Level: 🍆🍆/5

Thank you to Berkley Publishing and Penguin Random House Audio for gifting me review copies of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. This book was everything—it gave me all the feels. There were tough moments, past issues, and difficult relationships to be dealt with, parts that made me laugh so incredibly hard, and more than a few swoon-y parts that had my heart all a-flutter. And can we give it up for all the STEM ladies please!!

Olive Smith is a Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford, and she doesn’t believe in happy-ever afters. What she does believe in is finding a lab that can support the continuation of her research.

Adam Carlson is a Stanford professor with a reputation for being a major a-hole.

Olive’s best friend is interested in her ex, and Olive just wants them to be happy. Her bestie won’t betray the girl-code unless she’s sure Olive has moved on. So in a fit of not-really-thinking-things-through Olive tells her friend she’s going on a date, but when she gets busted outside the labs, she grabs the first guy she sees and kisses him to try and convince her friend. Of course that guy happens to be Adam A-hole Carlson, who threatens to report her for sexual assault (as he probably should).

The two decide that a bit of fake dating might be mutually beneficial, and so our story begins...

If we’ve been booksta-friends for a while you’ll know that the only thing I love more than fake dating is good banter. This book has it in spades! The internal dialogue is gold, but I absolutely loved all the conversations Olive had with her friends, and of course the conversations she had with Adam too.

The audiobook was narrated by Callie Dalton, and she is so, so good! It comes in at 11 hours and 8 minutes but once you start you won’t want to put this one down.

There aren’t a lot of steamy scenes in the book but the ones that are, are pretty 🔥, so I was hovering between a two and a two and a half eggplant rating for this one.

You can grab a physical copy of the book via the button below, or get the audio right now, here.

Synopsis:

As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees.

That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.