This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Olive Smith has never been too interested in romance; she is dedicated to her demanding doctoral program and her goal to come up with a simple early-detection test for pancreatic cancer. She does, however, care about her best friend Anh’s happiness. That means Olive has to convince Anh that she doesn’t have feelings for the man she briefly dated — so that Anh and Jeremy, who clearly like each other, can feel free to date.
And dating someone new is the best way to convince her friend — so Olive rashly kisses the first man she comes across one night when Anh is in sight.
The kiss recipient is Dr. Adam Carlsen, a brilliant young professor who is infamous for being incredibly difficult. A jerk. Insensitive. She couldn’t have picked someone worse. But oddly enough, Adam agrees to fake-date Olive for a while.
Our plucky heroine acknowledges in the story to friends and to Adam himself that this arrangement is a well-known trope of rom-coms. But there it is: she’s living it. Of course, this agreement lands her in all kinds of sticky and uncomfortable situations, as fake-dating does. And, naturally, everyone (but Olive) knows that it leads to real love that is tricky to acknowledge once you’re in this deep.
The Love Hypothesis is a fun take on a very well-used trope; it’s also pretty smart and has an unusual setting. Its author is a professor and holds a doctorate in neuroscience, so she knows whereof she writes: the tough halls of academia. It was a little challenging for me to swallow some of the conditions that led to the setup in the first part of the book, but once it got moving, it was easy to just relax into it and enjoy the entertaining story and relationship between the characters and between them and their friends and colleagues. The only reason I can’t endorse it heartily is the heavy use of profanity and detailed sex scenes. (So common, like these similar adult romance book reviews: Book Lovers or The Spanish Love Deception.)
Rated: High. There are 45 instances of strong profanity, about 115 uses of moderate language, around 40 instances of mild profanity, and about 55 uses of the name of Deity in vain. There are two back-to-back very detailed sex scenes that are a few pages long. There is one instance of a brief fistfight between two men. A woman is sexually harassed (an attempt at a kiss and a demeaning verbal attack) in a work environment.
Click here to purchase your copy of The Love Hypothesis on Amazon.
