Elsie is a theoretical physicist, stuck in a dead-end job she hates – teaching ungrateful students who keep emailing her day and night with excuses as to why they can’t meet their deadlines – while barely making ends meet. To get by, she works as a fake girlfriend for a company called Faux: men who are tired of their family members asking them when they’re going to find a girl, or men who need a plus-one for a corporate dinner, hire Elsie for the night. She’s good at what she does, a natural pleaser. But then, she gets an interview for a position at MIT: her dream job, really. The only problem is that she meets Jack, the only man she can’t seem to please no matter what.
So yes, of course, they end up fucking like bunnies on the windowsill, though in all fairness it takes them the better part of the book to get there. I’m not spoiling anything; the entire enemies-to-lovers thing is a staple of the genre.
I’m fairly new to the whole romance genre and all I knew about this one going in is that Ali Hazelwood seems to be a staple of the genre. She slowly seems to be pushing Colleen Hoover off the shelves of my local bookstore and for that alone I am grateful.
It’s the kind of lighthearted fun that made me turn to the genre in the first place. I liked the setting; the world of academia is a fascinating snakepit of a place, where grudges dating back to the Cro-Magnon era hold sway and where people carry a chip the size of Mt Everest on their shoulder. If anything, that aspect of the novel is underdeveloped and a bit oversimplified, but doing it justice would be better suited to an Armando Iannuchi film. It also doesn’t talk about physics too much, which is a blessing to me because I know hardly anything about it (I read A Brief History of Time and other than the fact that I read it, I remember nothing). The relationship dynamics are fun enough (and a lot less fucked up than the aforementioned Hoover), so that’s a blessing. I even enjoyed the sex scenes. Writing sex is tricky; more often than not, it’s awkward and cringy and terribly unerotic, so small wonder that most authors skip it altogether, but Hazelwood managed to make it respectful and raunchy at the same time, so kudos to her for that.
Other things were less enjoyable. For one, the characters never convince. I liked Elsie well enough, though as a reader you do wonder how someone can be so unsuccessful and successful at the same time. Jack, on the other hand, is a cardboard cutout and none of the things the author tries to make him come to life really seem to work. He’s into Elsie and into physics, that’s basically the extent of his personality. Their conversations are frequently awkward and stilted, and they never really come across as anything other than plot devices. There are also a fair number of plot points that are underdeveloped, such as Elsie’s relationship with her family, her mentor, or her roommate, and for me personally, the humour frequently misses the mark.
Considering the rate with which Hazelwood has been cranking out books, she’s doing great, but I do wonder what it would be like if she took a bit more time to get things on the page. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference, and I did enjoy this book, but I think it could do with a bit more structure, finesse and depth. But who knows what the future will bring? The makings of a really good book are there; it just needs a bit of oomph.
