Love, Theoretically Review

Bad Blurb: Elsie has a part time job as a fake-girlfriend, but that threatens to ruin everything when the brother of the guy she pretends to date is on the hiring committee of a field completely different than what she said she did. Oh, and he's hot.

Love, Theoretically Review

Book by Ali Hazelwood

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

To be honest, I’m still questioning how I feel about this book, but overall, it was a very enjoyable reading experience.

I liked the basic premise of her getting “caught in a lie” due to her fake-girlfriend-for-hire job and it affecting her real aspirations. I felt that part was done exceptionally well because there was a valid reason why she could not simply explain.

I liked the romance between Elsie and Jack, and I loved the inclusion of how tortured he felt when he thought she was with his brother. I would have liked more of that. Jack was a bit perfect. I kept thinking that he wrote that paper at such a young age because he wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps, and it was a complete mistake when it ended up discrediting the department. It would have been interesting for him to have failed at something so colossally that it affected the whole field. Getting revenge for his mom was good too, but it felt a little predictable or easy.

I felt as though Elsie didn’t really have a good enough reason to be angry at him. He was always nice to her, even if he was sarcastic at times, but I chalked that up to banter. She just seemed to assume that he was an a-hole.

I also really liked being thrust back into the world of academia. Once again I found myself pretending I knew enough about science to follow along.

My main issue was that I was not sure how I felt about Elsie, and I felt like her character fell victim to a lot of telling rather than showing. To keep everyone around her happy, she would alter her personality and interests to make them happy. This in itself is a great thing to watch someone work through as I feel lots of people (including myself) can relate to doing this. And the best example of it was when she lied about liking the same movies as her roommate because she was worried about expressing different interests.

However, instead of continuing to show examples or perhaps use the narration to juxtapose her reluctance with her false enthusiasm, there was a lot of telling. The narration employed this idea of “different Elsies,” which to me trivialized an issue that could have been portrayed with mire subtlety without minimizing the importance.

This issue came up during Jack’s talk about consent with Elsie, expressing his worries that she was not capable of really consenting if she couldn’t really express her own wishes. This is a really important conversation, and it felt a little minimized by Elsie’s constant talk of finding different Elsies to be.

My critique of how it was portrayed is a little nitpicky, but it affected my enjoyment of a section of the book that showed a lot of growth.

I think Hazelwood writes connections and compatibility very well, and I definitely had the sense that these characters were inexplicably drawn to each other. There was a certain point where their relationship felt a bit lopsided based on how much Jack wanted to help her with her personal growth and how long she had spent resenting him earlier in the book. I also would have liked Elsie to drive her own personal growth rather than Jack pushing her towards the growth instead.

I still very much recommend. It’s a fun book, and it’s an easy romance to root for. No critique that I mentioned drastically altered my experience of reading the book. Also Granny Smith was a GOAT.