Liar, Liar, Grants on Fire: Love, Academia Style

Ali Hazelwood's latest, Love, Theoretically was even better than I expected.  Once again, Hazelwood gives us a genius-yet-down-to-earth heroine who has only one foe more formidable than big, bad academia: herself.  This time her name is Dr. Elsie Hannaway, and she's a theoretical physicist with a concentration in crystals.  She also has type I diabetes and an uncontrollable habit of lying.  It's not that she's a bad person.  To the contrary, Elsie wants everyone to like her so much that she chameleons into the versions of herself she thinks they want to see.  It's an exhausting existence made even more so by her low-paying, no-benefits job as an adjunct professor -- and her side hustle of fake dating.  You read what you read.  Elsie pretends to be dudes' girlfriends for money.  But before you get it twisted, she's not that kind of escort, something she makes crystal clear when a lowlife client offers her seventy dollars to go above and beyond a dinner appearance.  So she's at the end of her rope when she discovers that the guy who can give her her dream job at MIT is none other than one of her fake bf's brothers and the guy who discredited her profession with one righteously indignant article.  

Ah, experimental physicist John Smith.  Because, yes, that's his name.  Or, as he prefers, Dr. Jack Turner-Smith.  Now, I have no understanding of physics whatsoever, but Hazelwood explains the theoretical-vs.-experimental rivalry in such simple and entertaining terms that I didn't miss a particle.  To that end, Jack may just be the most Hazelwood of Hazelwood heroes yet, calculatingly cockblocking Elsie's career only to end up being the key to unlock her best self.  The thing about Jack is that he doesn't like lying.  So he challenges Elsie to stop doing it, promising her that she'll be happier once she starts putting herself first.  It's a tricky trope, this alpha-male-means-to-an-end of unparalleled compassion.  Especially when Elsie discovers that Jack's been telling a pretty big whopper himself.  But as always, Hazelwood gets the formula just right one witty one-liner at a time, showing the world that the strong, silent type can also be strong and sensitive.   

Bonus of bonuses, Love, Theoretically includes a cameo from The Love Hypothesis's Olive and Adam as well as two references to Love on the Brain's Bee.  STEM academia really is a small world.  

And a surprisingly romantic one. 

SySTEMically Sweet: Love Sick Schtick

Dr. Bee Konigswasser's not your average romcom heroine.  A purple-haired, pierced, and tattooed neuroscientist who runs an anonymous Twitter account called What Would Marie (Curie) Do?, she gets freaked out by spiders and stress and passes out at the drop of a hat.  Now, as someone who's fainted a time or two, I couldn't help but wonder how she made it through all those tattoos and piercings.  Because the mere thought of needles has me reaching for my smelling salts.  Then again, Bee is a conundrum of contradictions.  And that's part of what makes Ali Hazelwood's Love on the Brain so much fun to read.

Much like its predecessor, The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain is an enemies-to-lovers love story that's also about being a woman in male-dominated STEM.  So when seemingly surly engineer Levi Ward turns out to be Bee's ally in co-leading a high-profile project at NASA, it's more than the setup for an office romance.  It's an "I see you" moment for women, a kind of reimagining of the mutual respect and, okay, (alleged) lust that combusted between Marie and Pierre.  And that's the kind of devotion that Bee's looking for.  She's been orphaned, cheated on, and betrayed, all traumas that feed her need for true love -- but also her fear of it.

Hazelwood tackles loss, misogyny, and even standardized testing (I'm looking at you, GREs) with wit and levity, making Love on the Brain a dopamine fix with depth.  Also, there's a character who carries a watermelon-shaped purse.  So Hazelwood's next novel, Love, Theoretically, which comes out next week, is on my TBR list.   

Because I love love -- especially when it shares the spotlight with feminism and fashion.