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A review by juliad55
Loathe to Love You by Ali Hazelwood
5.0
and you know what i will not write a single critique of these novellas even though i have many and the overly formulaic miscommunication antics can get tiring. because girls deserve LOVE and at it’s cheesiest three besties fell in love with the men of their dreams and for that i have no comment besides <3 awwww. five stars for goofy cheesy silly unrealistic lovely romcom vibes. kind of want to cry? maybe i should be an engineer because i too think about outer space a lot. i don’t know. book was more vibes than plot.
actually you know what? i have more to say. why does every single book by this author (and a recurring theme in hetero romance novels) have to be about a “small” woman and a man that’s described repeatedly as “big” in the sense of extremely tall and muscular. absolutely no diversity of physical characteristics except for now they’ve introduced blondes and gingers into the mix. and i LOVE the smart science steminist genre of women with fleshed our backgrounds and work lives and real friendships with other women in romance but the continuous overuse of miscommunication and “mainstream attractive” (i hate that but can’t think of another way to describe it) physical attributes is tiring to me. and there’s such minuscule allusion to a bi/wlw main character in this book but it’s, like, that’s it. at that point i’m just tired of girl meets brooding hot white man being repeated without any sort of focus on the numerous other people that exists within the fields of STEM and experience love. it feels like picking tropes off social media based off of what’ll go viral, what an algorithm likes, and turning it into a book. the three different scenarios here feel like overlays for the same formula of story and the relationships are not grounded in place but rather in the tropes they inhabit. for all the science-y coolness of the women, they’re often just boiled down to whatever trait they need to inhabit for a romance trope, whether that be emotionally distant or extremely cheery. same goes for the men, who are mostly just brooding and hot and sometimes have different hair colors now. so i give it a sappy five stars because when i read romance novels i just want to cry and giggle the whole time so it’s five stars if FEELINGS but in my real girl brain i’m, like, one-starring it because these just feel like summaries of viral tropes of romance—commodifying love, running tests on the kind of love that sells and picking a science themed overlay to package it. which, for me, can work once or twice, but at some point the characters need to not be just the same people in different fonts if i’m going to attempt to enjoy more out from this author. this book made me feel like i need to debrief on romance novels for like 500 hours my head was spinning i have so many thoughts
actually you know what? i have more to say. why does every single book by this author (and a recurring theme in hetero romance novels) have to be about a “small” woman and a man that’s described repeatedly as “big” in the sense of extremely tall and muscular. absolutely no diversity of physical characteristics except for now they’ve introduced blondes and gingers into the mix. and i LOVE the smart science steminist genre of women with fleshed our backgrounds and work lives and real friendships with other women in romance but the continuous overuse of miscommunication and “mainstream attractive” (i hate that but can’t think of another way to describe it) physical attributes is tiring to me. and there’s such minuscule allusion to a bi/wlw main character in this book but it’s, like, that’s it. at that point i’m just tired of girl meets brooding hot white man being repeated without any sort of focus on the numerous other people that exists within the fields of STEM and experience love. it feels like picking tropes off social media based off of what’ll go viral, what an algorithm likes, and turning it into a book. the three different scenarios here feel like overlays for the same formula of story and the relationships are not grounded in place but rather in the tropes they inhabit. for all the science-y coolness of the women, they’re often just boiled down to whatever trait they need to inhabit for a romance trope, whether that be emotionally distant or extremely cheery. same goes for the men, who are mostly just brooding and hot and sometimes have different hair colors now. so i give it a sappy five stars because when i read romance novels i just want to cry and giggle the whole time so it’s five stars if FEELINGS but in my real girl brain i’m, like, one-starring it because these just feel like summaries of viral tropes of romance—commodifying love, running tests on the kind of love that sells and picking a science themed overlay to package it. which, for me, can work once or twice, but at some point the characters need to not be just the same people in different fonts if i’m going to attempt to enjoy more out from this author. this book made me feel like i need to debrief on romance novels for like 500 hours my head was spinning i have so many thoughts