Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood | Book Review

Synopsis:

The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she’s an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs.

Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down. Because Jack Smith, the annoyingly attractive and broody older brother of her favorite client, turns out to be the cold-hearted experimental physicist who ruined her mentor’s career and undermined the reputation of theorists everywhere. And that same Jack who now sits on the hiring committee at MIT, right between Elsie and her dream job.

Elsie is prepared for an all-out war of scholarly sabotage but…those long, penetrating looks? Not having to be anything other than her true self when she’s with him? Will falling into an experimentalist’s orbit finally tempt her to put her most guarded theories on love into practice?

My Review

This should have been an easy 5 star read for me, because I loved it… I really really loved it. 4 stars is still a high rating, and I hate that I had to dock a star for this but it’s becoming a huge problem in fiction that authors like to drag their political views into everything. We can’t just have pleasant, neutral fiction anymore. It’s the same reason I didn’t give The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo a 5 star rating, because Taylor Jenkins Reid is the exact same way. They sprinkle unnecessary, controversial, divisive, topics virtue signaling their political biases in their books that have no contribution to the story at hand other than to unnecessarily politicize it. And it makes one ask themselves, whom are you even writing for? Are you writing for everyone? Or only for those who share your political biases?

To name just a few of the controversial political topics that have come up in this book, it dusts over:

• Vaccination status
• Racist/sexist stereotyping of white males
• Climate change theory
• Political bias name dropping
• Sex work being respectable work

All of these things were brought up in passing rambling that had no real contribution to the story and could have been left out altogether for the sake of reaching a wider audience. While I eye-rolled when these things came up, it didn’t ruin the book for me and I still genuinely enjoyed the story, the same way I enjoyed The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I can look past my own political biases to enjoy things, but I know in today’s world, we are so politically divided that many people can’t. This book is filled with far left propaganda, and I encourage all you lefty readers to implore, if the roles were reversed and all your favorite fiction was filled with far right propaganda, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it so much either now, would you? This is why authors really need to leave their books neutral. No one needs your virtue signaling, or want to listen to you ramble about how you feel about climate change, or your position on sex workers, or your bitter feminist/sexist/racist stereotyping of specifically “white males” in the same sense that people also don’t need to hear other authors sprinkle in their feelings about loving Trump, or being pro-life, or whatever other far right political biases.

The point is, please stop making fiction your political platform. People read books as a means of escape from all of that because we’re already so bombarded with it in the news, social media, tv shows, it’s everywhere these days. If you want to talk about it in a book, then please, do feel empowered to write an entire book about it so people who are interested in that specific topic can read about it and the rest of us don’t have to. But please, for the love of god, leave it out of fiction and keep fiction neutral so everyone can enjoy them.

Rant aside, there were many things I enjoyed about this book. It was a bit too rambly at times, but the commentary was humorous, and I absolutely loved seeing the transformation of Elsie becoming her own person and Jack helping heal her while also healing himself. It’s a really quirky but heart-felt love story and definitely a book I would re-read, despite the author’s annoying political propaganda sprinkled in.

The Cozy Cat Rating: ★★★★