In brief: Olive finds herself in a fake relationship with the most hated professor in the biology department to ensure her best friend gets her happily ever after.
The good: Science, labs and fun.
The not-so-good: Took me a little time to get into the groove of this story.
Why I chose it: Science! Women in STEM!
Year: 2021
Pages: 373
Publisher: Little, Brown (Hachette)
Setting: Mainly California, USA
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
The Love Hypothesis had been on my radar for some time after seeing it on Christina Lauren’s Instagram. Thanks to the TikTok craze over this book, it became a lot easier to find a copy locally! This book is a great fake romance story but its crowning glory is that it’s set firmly in the science world. The main character, Olive, is a PhD student studying biomarkers for pancreatic cancer. Her fake relationship partner, Adam, is a successful biology professor with a lot of grants. The story is mainly set in the labs and on campus at university with a conference trip thrown in. It’s a familiar setting, but not to the romance world. But it works so well!
Olive, like most PhD students, is poor, tired and hungry. The bright parts of her life are her research (when it’s going well) and her friends. Olive’s best friend Anh has a crush on Jeremy, who Olive briefly, mistakenly dated. Friend code means Anh won’t go near him, but Olive wants her friend to have her chance at love. So she kisses the nearest male in the lab late one night, who happens to be Adam Carlsen. Friend to no PhD student and destroyer of dreams. Olive asks Adam to help her out and proposes a fake relationship that will benefit them both – Olive to her friends and Adam to the university. This will be the proof Anh needs that Olive is over Jeremy. But having a fake relationship brings multiple dramas for Olive and her colleagues, friends and research. To top it off, she starts to develop a crush on Adam…
The setting of the book is so familiar – postgrad uni, labs, research and all the dramas that go with research that feel huge when you’re in the middle of them. I loved that science was at the front, centre and back of this book. There’s even some statistics mentioned alongside cancer biomarkers. (If you’re not into these topics, you’ll still love the book. But the little science extras are the icing on the cake to those who known). It did take me a little while to get into the groove of Olive’s student life (thesis flashbacks I suspect) but once I was there, I loved the setting, the characters and the fake relationship. Hazelwood has a knack for great dialogue and putting her characters in awkward situations. Think having to put sunscreen on your fake lover. Getting ripped apart by a creep for something that’s entirely incorrect. Falling in love with someone who doesn’t understand pumpkin spice.
Finally, there’s romance fiction options in STEM. Thank you, Ali Hazelwood.
Sam Still Reading 
I’m looking forward to reading this book.