Problematic Summer Wardrobe

Dress: Betsey Johnson, Zulily

Pancakes should always be served with whipped cream.

Bag: LC Lauren Conrad, Kohl's

Bow: Art Class, Target

Bag: Francesca's

Sweatshirt: LC Lauren Conrad, Kohl's

Skirt: On 34th, Macy's

Dress: ModCloth

Bag: LC Lauren Conrad, Kohl's

Shoes: LC Lauren Conrad, Kohl's

Oversized Anchor Necklace

Sweet suburban skyline sans storefronts.

Bag: Isaac Mizrahi, Marshalls

Headband: INC, Macy's

You know that I dread the end of summer and refuse to acknowledge it until October.  Well, samesies this year.  So until then, I'm going to keep on trucking sailing with my unseasonal summer ensembles.  And I'm going to keep reading beach books, too.  Like Ali Hazelwood's Problematic Summer Romance.  

This one is about a twenty-three-year-old, award-winning physicist named Maya and her "inappropriate" crush on her brother's thirty-eight-year-old, biotech billionaire bestie, Conor.  Maya may be a genius, but, like Halsey, she's "bad at love."  Yet (also like Halsey), you can't blame her for trying -- especially during her brother's wedding week in lemon-scented Sicily.  Less STEM, ahem, coded than Hazelwood's previous romcoms, Problematic Summer Romance is more easy breezy.  Because even eggheads sometimes leave the lab to play the field -- and the fool -- like the rest of us.  Smart and snappy, it's rife with pop culture references, all of which enhance Maya's journey.  So, just what you want from a summer romance -- and a book about one.   

That said, my own (sartorial, not relationship) problems have only begun.  

By which I mean brights, bare legs, and produce prints in the face of flannel and pumpkin spice. 

Also, white shoes after Labor Day.  

Engineering Excitement: The Better to Hear You With

When I heard that Ali Hazelwood wrote a collection of rom com short fiction, I thought, how is she going to cram all that will-they-won't-they tension into a hundred words?  Because that's the average length of each novella.  But -- spoiler alert! -- the trio of tales in Loathe to Love You delivers all the slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance of a full-length novel without the pesky backslide into conflict.  Three engineer besties battle the patriarchy -- and themselves -- to find bliss with their nerds in shining armor.  As with every Hazelwood heartthrob, these dudes are no poindexters, boasting, along with mega-brains, brawn.  Better yet, they aren't afraid to use their most important body parts of all: their ears.  Because there are few things more seductive than a man who actually listens.  

What more can a modern woman want?

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.

Big Hearts and Body Parts

I had so much fun doing a book compare and contrast that I decided to do it again!  What's under the microscope and magnifying glass this time?  Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and Elle Cosimano's Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead.  I read The Love Hypothesis on my own, and Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead was my sister's book club selection (as you may recall, my sister got us started on this series with Finlay Donovan is Killing It.) 

The Love Hypothesis is a romcom about Olive Smith, a dedicated but mistrustful-of-love Stanford scientist who embarks upon a fake relationship to help her best friend find true love (and yes, that premise is as farcical as it sounds and not something I'm getting into).  Olive's playacting paramour?  Biology department alpha Adam Carlsen, a gorgeous and brilliant specimen of a man who's awful to everyone except Olive.  With her, he's funny and charming, protective and tender, and so respectful it's an aphrodisiac.  Not that Olive falls for him right away.  Oh no, she fights Cupid with every fiber of her being, so intent on denying herself happiness that sometimes I wanted to shake her.  Still, I understand that she has her issues (her mom died of cancer when she was a teenager), and that surrendering to love can be scary.  But when her smarmy Harvard mentor crosses the line, she hits rock bottom and learns that the only way out is to open up and ask for help.

Then there's Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead, which isn't at all romantic unless you count Finaly's love triangle with a callow law student and a seasoned detective.  Which I don't, because the number one relationship in Finaly's life (after the one with her kids, of course) is her friendship with partner Vero.  Not only is Vero an ace accountant and nanny; she's also Finlay's ride-or-die when it comes to tracking down the killer contracted to end Finaly's ex.  That's right.  The sod farm king is now the quarry, with the Russian mob lurking in the background making sure the bodies stay buried.  And it all started in a chat room masquerading as a safe space for wives to swap cleaning tips and trash their husbands.  The whole domestic-life-as-a-front-for-illegal-activity thing reeks of Good Girls -- in a very good way.  And I do mean "reek," given that fish, visitors, and bodies start to smell after three days.

So, yeah, these two books are different.  Even if both have blue covers and represent the seemingly safe fiction genres of romance and mystery or, as I like to call them, sex and violence.  I enjoyed both.  The Love Hypothesis is a classic slow burn love story, and its characters have great chemistry (even if they are biologists).  I heart a hero who can honor the heroine's independence while also being chivalrous.  And Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead is just so clever and funny.  If it weren't funny, then I wouldn't be able to read it, because it's also pretty gory.  But as with everything else, the jokes set the right tone for me, reducing even the darkest scene to a merely macabre comic strip.       

Still, I preferred The Love Hypothesis.  

Knights in shining armor over armed robberies.