Hazelwood continues to do the thing, which is to reframe her popular prior fiction into a series focused on the lives of female STEM students/graduates (jury is still out on the portmanteau “STEMinist.” I do not hate it the way others do, but I do not love it. I think I am torn as to whether it is another Girlboss or a clever form of branding).
This is a very short novella, with almost 15% of length nonetheless authors notes and the like. There are a few more of these coming out, to whet the appetite of the audience ahead of a longer novel that appears to focus on rival science people and the male scientist who starts being a proper ally to his female colleague. Sign me up, that’s my real porn.
This book, and the story which inspired it, is based on a framing mechanism that I do actually enjoy when done well: the “x [time period] before” cut scene, which gives us the ending in media res and then jumps back some time to show you how we got there.
Look, did this take me more than an hour to finish? Not even close. Did I think it really showed off the STEMinists to their full potential? Well, it definitely set up the STEMinist universe really well, and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the scenes play out from the perspective of the other two friends in their short novels as well. This is a tropetastic book (I kid you not his job is basically defending fossil fuel companies and she is an environmental rights lawyer, they are both forced to share the same house for reasons that make perfect sense legally speaking, they see each other semi-naked for reasonable reasons) that is like a whiplash of NC-17 and PG. You know if you’ll like it, but even if you don’t it’s not very long.
