Book Review: Love, Theoretically
It’s hardly summertime if we don’t have a new Ali Hazelwood novel to look forward to, and this year brings us her third full-length novel Love, Theoretically. While still every bit as much a STEM-focused rom-com as her earlier works, Love, Theoretically is arguably the most serious of her works, immersing the reader in the politics of academia, and giving the heroine an interesting personal journey to accompany her romantic one.
Dr. Elsie Hannaway, like so many of us in this day and age, works two jobs. She is an adjunct professor - all of the work, none of the benefits - at three universities in Boston by day, and by night she works for the app Faux, posing as a fake girlfriend to anyone who might be in need of one. While Faux generally has a strict one-date policy, Elsie makes an exception for Greg Smith, a client-turned-friend, who also happens to have an extremely attractive, arrogant older brother, Jack.
Elsie doesn’t think much of Jack’s dislike of her. After all, she only has to see him when she pretends to be Greg’s girlfriend. That changes when she finds out she is up for a tenure-track position at MIT…and Jack is on the hiring committee. Jack is horrified to learn that his brother’s librarian girlfriend is apparently neither a librarian, nor actually his girlfriend, and the two get off to an even rockier start. Add in the existing professional tensions between experimental physicists (Jack) and theoretical physicists (Elsie), and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Throughout the novel, Elsie takes great pride in being able to shape herself to be exactly the kind of person whoever she is interacting with will want to see. It’s people-pleasing taken to such an extreme, that even as she and Jack begin to grow closer, he’s not 100% sure if he’s seeing the real her, or just the version of herself that Elsie wants him to see.
It’s that part, more than the academic politics - which are frustrating for how real I know them to be - that grounded the book for me. It’s one thing to act differently in front of different people - the me that my grandmother sees is not the same me my friends see. But Love, Theoretically really speaks to all of us who have felt, at one point or another, that in an effort to be the “right” sort of person, we’ve lost sight of the true person we are along the way. It also reinforces the very important message that anyone claiming to love you, will and should love you exactly as you are, not as you’ve tailored yourself to be.
Love, Theoretically is available June 13, 2023. Special thank you to Berkley for the advance copy for review purposes.