Reviews

Fantastic, Hazelwood’s best work yet! I loved how much more she got into the politics of academia and Elsie’s character growth, her rage. I felt all the frustration Hazelwood must feel in her field. Her voice is a refreshing insight into the perils of being a women in STEM and academia, balancing self-aware, hopeless-romantic ridiculousness with the realities of life for a part-time PhD student.

I hope she approaches future books with this more academic lens, and I respect how shamelessly hazelwood write what she likes. It’s fun, but the characters are still built up so well with their frustrations and complications which hit me at their most devastating moments. The fights between the characters were charged with understandable issues and the biggest conflict was not some dumb misunderstanding solely related to the couple’s inability to communicate. Instead it was an accumulation of our heroine’s confusion, a fight against herself resolved with her coming to terms with facing her flaws. It was our male lead taking responsibility and being called out for his actions. He could be flawed even while remaining book-boyfriend material.

Not only is the banter fantastic as usual, but we got to see how a people pleasing character was able to fight back and be freed by the enemies to lovers dynamic. We felt her perplexed over-analyzation of learning how to let herself be loved and have someone know details about her most inner life.

While Jack is an escape and not the most realistic, the book is bout Elsie. It’s about how a partner can help you see yourself differently, but you are the person to decide how to stand up for yourself.

I love Elsie because she feels like the author’s sigh of relief, rant on a page.
It’s about her simple indulgences in what are seen as frivolous (twilight) just because it’s fun, her intelligence and fascination with her field, her moments of internalized sexism, how much invisible and emotional labor she thinks she has to put up, her health insurance scares, audacity, and well of buried rage. It is so distinctly relieving to read about a character who embodies the tangled ball that is this section of womanhood. The anger that is experienced which I was never taught to let out while growing up.

To read books like these is to remind women of how they are allowed to feel more than just palatable and soft emotions. It is a right to allow for indulgence in both the beauty and ugliness of human experience.

Wonderful work.