I wasn’t expecting greatness from Love on the Brain. But I at least expected to enjoy it as much as her last book The Love Hypothesis. Instead it became a rather sad DNF and I’m mostly annoyed that I bought it.
I knew in two chapters this wasn’t going to work for me.
Overly Similar
This is about Bee a spunky scientist who gets offered the lead on a NASA project. Well co-lead because she’ll of course be working with her grad school arch-nemesis. And honestly describing Levi was the first red flag because all I could think was this is just the Adam character in mannerism and looks.
So it’s not just the same plot (minus the fake dating trope) it’s like the same two characters again.
But Gemma? What were you expecting. I’m not saying this has to be new and shiny- but I do like to imagine I’m not rereading the exact same book.
Telegraphed
Along those lines the other big problem was I could see what was coming. Even as Bee is describing how much Levi hated her and how poorly he treated her (always nice when you know this is going to turn into a love story) I could tell he was already in love with her.
And Bee is apparently the smart one.
Also I don’t think I need to tell you who the Twitter/DM friend is going to wind up being. To be fair I don’t think Hazelwood was trying to hide that one. At least I hope not because if it’s supposed to be a surprise, oh dear.
The Harassment
I thought the Love Hypothesis did a good job of showing the harassment and daily problems women in STEM face.
But this one felt over the top for me. And look I’m not trying to take away from real problems or say that it has no place in books but when I’m only in chapter two and like come on! I mean the story she tells about giving the students in a class a survey on her teaching and the things that came back.
Those things are not signed but in this day and age I really question how many sexually harassing responses she got back from the students. I mean I went to college and there’s always going to be assholes but would that many really take a chance like that? Also we get an all male teaching group that tells her to get over it. And this is followed by a Twitter thread (always my favorite thing) which includes a misogynistic jerk- which definitely could have come right off Twitter.
In which he is taken to task by the guy who definitely, surely won’t turn out to be Levi 🙂
So Love on the Brain on the brain was a let down. But if you’re planning on reading it. I hope you enjoy it!