The Love Hypothesis Is a Mixed Bag of Sweet and Spicy

I'm always apprehensive about picking up a book that has a lot of hype. I have found that when I expect that the book will be as amazing as everyone says it is, I get disappointed. That was my biggest fear picking up The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. But I think I have found a way to escape the "hype bias": don't know anything about the book at the beginning. I knew it was a fake dating book set in academia and that there was a long, steamy scene. All of those are true and that is the extent of prior knowledge you should have.

I loved figuring out the story as I went. Not that it is a very complicated story: Grad student Olive Smith is trying to get her best friend to date her (sort of) ex and ends up fake dating everyone's least favorite professor (who does not teach her!). It is quite a simple premise, so much so that at first I thought it would be too basic and that fake dating should always be partnered with enemies to lovers. Although I do still believe that that is the best possible combination, I loved how many layers Hazelwood added to the simple fake dating, one example being Adam overhearing that Olive has a crush on someone (him) but he thinks it's someone else.

I really enjoyed the narration and I think the choice to do it in the third person worked perfectly for this book. Olive feels like a character whose mind would be so scattered and reactive to everything in the story that making it first person would have made it either too chaotic or we would lose some of her character. The third person also helped with the dramatic irony of Adam liking Olive. I also loved how sweet the beginning was and how innocent their relationship was. That is until it got steamy, then I did not like it as much.

I also quite liked all the characters and I think Hazelwood developed them very well. Olive was very relatable and she was one of those characters that you just start reading the book and know that you are with them no matter what happens.

I loved the dramatic irony with Adam and his liking Olive. I liked the establishment of their first meeting in the prologue and how we just knew the whole time that it was him. I also just liked Adam in general. I have heard criticism that he is only said to be the worst and we don't actually see him being the worst, but I think I liked that about it. We have multiple accounts of him not being nice to different people and it works that she had a preconceived notion of who he was and by getting to know him, it was proved wrong. The descriptions of him are a bit outlandish, however. Olive is described as a pretty tall woman, yet she always feels small around him. How tall could Adam be? Also, since he is described so often as physically attractive, big, and buff, I would expect that that is one of the things the students would be saying about him too, not just that he is mean.

My favorite characters have to be Malcolm and Holden. I liked their side plot and I think their romance just made the whole situation more fun. I was disappointed only with how little Malcolm was in it. I think the book needed more of the scenes where Olive was able to turn to him as the only person who knew about her secret and debrief on what was going on or him helping her lie in front of Ahn and others. He did appear more when Olive began having feelings for Adam, but I wanted more. Maybe if some (or maybe for the betterment of humanity, all) of the steamy scenes were cut, we could have had more moments with Malcolm. Holden was also the best from the start. I loved his dynamic with Adam and just everything he said. I am aware that he, and a lot about the book, was cringey, but I loved him anyway.

I had a lot of problems with Anh and Tom. Anh was just so annoying and she just kept putting Olive in the worst situations. I know that she didn't know that they were fake dating, but I don't think I would ever turn to a friend's boyfriend who I didn't really know and tell her to put sunscreen on his bareback in front of all of her colleagues and bosses. Even after she found out, there was just something very annoying about her.

I was onto Tom from the start. There was something fishy about him and I knew that there was no way that her potential new employer being friends with the guy he thinks is her boyfriend wasn't going to impact anything. I was shocked when his big scene flirting with her came, but inside, I knew it was coming.

I think one part where the book falls short is the dialogue. I liked the bits of dialogue in it but there just wasn't enough. I love books with a lot of dialogue because those are the moments when the characters come to life and you are able to just picture them and feel their relationships develop. In these kinds of romance books, witty banter makes the book shine and this one just didn't have enough dialogue.

The thing about this book that most bothered me was the ending. Not them being together or the "happily ever after." I didn't like how for the last like three chapters, the book completely shifted and became a cautionary tale about lying and how "honesty is the best policy." I understand that this is a book about fake dating, and therefore, there is lying involved, but the fact that they were lying to a bunch of people was not a major problem in the plot until the end. And then the end had a sort of Matt Haig in the Midnight Library situation where every other line was about how Olive had finally learned that she should tell the truth and not add more lies. Yes, throughout the book her lies snowballed and she was lying to everyone and Adam. But the lying was not thought of as an issue until the end. If it had been built up from the beginning, it would feel much more natural. However, even then, the way that that message was communicated in the book was more clear and more forced than themes in Disney movies.

Overall, The Love Hypothesis was a very fun and quick read. Something that was jarring was how sweet it was throughout with how steamy it turned all of a sudden. I did not enjoy the steamy factor, and that is where it started to get worse for me. It's still a fun book that romance fans should read, if not only for the hype, which it absolutely deserves.