Review

(Please be advised that this is an adult romance.)

Elsie is an adjunct professor, the slave underclass of academia. She teaches many physics classes at many Boston universities, marks a lot of bad student work and fields a daily flood of emails from students asking for extensions because they ‘have a butt rash (see attached pic)’. And it’s very poorly paid. So she and her flatmate make ends meet by being fake girlfriends. They’re signed up to an app called Faux, which offers a fake dating service. No sex, just arm candy. Fake last names, fake careers: Elsie pretends to be a children’s librarian. She’s good at it because she’s trained herself to be the world’s most epic people pleaser and personality chameleon. But she can’t wait to get a position that involves less teaching, more research, and zero Faux.

Then Elsie finds out that she’s in the final two for a tenure track position at MIT. Yes! Her dream job! All she has to do is to survive the three day interview process and beat out the other candidate, and she can kiss goodbye to ‘the dog ate my homework’ emails and fake dating. This job has decent pay! And health insurance!

But she also finds out that one of the people on the MIT hiring committee is Jack, the suspicious and disapproving brother of her favourite Faux client, who she’s met on several occasions in her capacity as a fake girlfriend/librarian. And that he’s the man responsible for sabotaging the career of her beloved academic mentor and dissing her entire field of study (theoretical physics, as opposed to experimental physics). He’s also weirdly good looking for an academic rockstar/asshole, and every time she turns around, there he is, accusing her of lying to his brother. And because she doesn’t want to out Jack’s brother as aro/ace, she can’t explain the situation. It’s complicated.

Elsie doesn’t care. She wants this job. She needs it. And no aggravatingly brilliant man mountain is going to stand in the way of her dream.

*

Clearly by this point, I am just an Ali Hazelwood fangirl. She’s so smart and so funny. I found out yesterday that Ali Hazelwood is her pen name, and that she was born and raised in Italy. Italy! How is her English so fantabulous?! Clever cookie. She’s a STEM professor in the US, or was until very recently.

Suffice it to say that this is another brilliant adult rom-com — do NOT buy it for your school library collection — and that I’ll be reading through the rest of her books, stat. I don’t know what’s kept me from doing it before now. (Perhaps the fact that they’re not available via Libby.)

P. S. If you want an Ali Hazelwood you CAN put in the school collection, I highly recommend her only YA novel, Check & Mate, set in the world of elite chess.

> Click here for content info — spoilers, enter at your own risk!

It’s an adult romance, so expect detailed sex scenes, discussion & references; Elsie has Type 1 diabetes; she also has insecurities that lead her to hyperanalyse other people and try to be what they want; she’s much put upon by her family and her mentor, and needs better boundaries (which she develops); some misogynistic comments by characters who swiftly experience negative consequences; cold and distant family members; over-controlling mentors; the exploitation of untenured academic staff; a dental emergency for a minor character (not much detail given, he just needs to be picked up while still woozy from anaesthetic). Main romance is mlw; other rep includes wlw and aro/ace. Hero is alpha with strong respect for women (typical Ali Hazelwood, and I’m here for it).

*

Hazelwood, A. (2023). Love, theoretically. Sphere.

Images are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.