A review by trinityb2021
Loathe to Love You by Ali Hazelwood

fast-paced

3.5

3.5 ⭐️ 

I love Ali Hazelwood to death. I have now officially read everything she’s ever published (besides a few bonus chapters for various books). These three novellas are just like her earlier works (The Love Hypothesis, Love on The Brain, etc.) but condensed into 100ish page versions. They have the larger than life MMC and the tiny STEM major FMC. They have rivals to lovers where he falls first and harder. All the things I love about the Ali Hazelwood novels. 

I think the first novella was excellent. It had a good amount of build up such a short story. I liked the dynamic and banter between the love interests and it had a satisfying end. However, for some reason the other two books lacked some of the same magic. I think I liked the second one more than the third? But they were both noticeably worse than the first one. Not near as much tension. 

I liked all the MMCs but Erik (2nd) felt the most boring. All of Hazelwood’s MMCs are brooding and lack loud character traits but Erik felt like his only character trait was being Danish. 

Hazelwood says in her Acknowledgements section that these were orignally all written as fanfic. . . girl I gotta know what celebrities were in mind because they couldn’t all be Adam Driver. This also seemed to be an experiment with non-linear story telling for her. Every novella featured a different way of using time-skips and flashbacks to tell the story instead of keeping it linear. I actually liked this a lot. I kind of hope she uses this writing style in one of her full novels at some point. 

1st Novella: 4 ⭐️ Great tension, interesting MMC, weird but interesting premise 

2nd Novella: 3.5 ⭐️ Boring MMC, well executed plot, fun set up 

3rd Novella: 3 ⭐️ Sex forward FMC (I love this), longterm pining, weird life or death situation