Romance & Contemporary Relationships
Elsie Hannaway holds down two jobs to survive academia: adjunct theoretical physicist by day, and, on the side, a professional fake girlfriend who reshapes her personality to suit each client.
Her two worlds collide catastrophically when a job interview at MIT pits her against Jonathan Smith-Turner - a celebrated experimental physicist she has been taught to despise, and, it turns out, the brother of one of her fake-dating clients.
Ali Hazelwood returns to her 'STEMinist' territory with another academic enemies-to-lovers rom-com, layering the swoon over pointed observations about the precarity of adjunct life and the pressure on women to perform whatever version of themselves others want. As ever, the pleasures are banter, slow-burn tension and a smart, self-deprecating heroine finally learning to want things for herself. It is warm, funny, escapist and unabashedly tropey.
For readers who loved The Love Hypothesis and want more science, more pining and more grumpy-hero chemistry, it is a reliably delightful bestseller.
The book
Elsie Hannaway, an adjunct theoretical physicist who moonlights as a fake girlfriend-for-hire, faces disaster when the brother of a client turns out to be Jonathan Smith-Turner, the famous, supposedly arrogant physicist standing between her and a dream job.
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