by Ali Hazelwood
4.8 · 4 reviewsShe needed a fake boyfriend for thirty seconds. She picked the one man on campus famous for never pretending about anything.
Olive Smith is a third-year biology PhD student with a clear-eyed view of romance: it's a chemical illusion she has no time for. But when she needs to convince her best friend that her own love life is thriving, she does the only logical thing a desperate scientist can do — she kisses the first man she stumbles across in a dark hallway. That man turns out to be Adam Carlsen, a notoriously stern young professor with a reputation for making grad students cry.
To Olive's surprise, Adam agrees to keep up the charade, for reasons of his own that have nothing to do with her. What begins as a tidy, mutually convenient arrangement quickly resists every attempt at control: there are pancakes and pretend dates, a high-stakes conference, lab politics, and the unsettling discovery that Adam is far warmer, and far more dangerous to her composure, than his glare suggests.
Told with sharp humor and genuine tenderness, this is a story about ambition, the messy data of the human heart, and what happens when a woman who trusts only the scientific method finds herself confronted with a hypothesis she can't disprove.
First published in 2021.
4 reviews
The kind of book that just makes you feel good. I loved that the heroine is the awkward one for once and the hero is quietly devoted the whole time. Warm, funny, and the emotional payoff at the end earned every tear.
Genuinely sweet and very readable. The fake-dating setup is comfort food and the leads have real chemistry. I docked a star because some beats felt predictable and Olive's stubbornness got repetitive in the middle, but I still finished it with a grin.
As someone who actually survived a PhD, the lab politics and impostor syndrome hit way too close to home. It's rare to find a fluffy rom-com this smart about how brutal grad school can be. The banter is top tier and I screamed at the conference scene.
I devoured this in a single weekend. Olive is the kind of heroine I wish I'd had in my twenties — funny, brilliant, and a complete disaster about her own feelings. Adam's slow thaw absolutely wrecked me. The pining is immaculate.