By day, Elsie is an adjunct physics professor, hating her life as she teaches entirely uninterested students and responding to their ludicrous emails, all with the hope of earning tenure. But when she’s not drudging her way through teaching ungrateful undergrads, she works as a fake girlfriend, passing herself off as whatever version her dates need her to be, to supplement her almost nonexistent salary. Elsie’s entirely different personalities collide when she scores an interview at MIT—and learns her fake boyfriend’s brother Jack is the head of the physics department. Jack, who thinks Elsie is a librarian, accuses her of being a fraud. Elsie and Jack clash hard; he’s an experimental physicist who wrote an article that tanked her mentor’s career, and she’s a theoretical physicist who dreams of landing a solid job so she can go back to working on what she truly cares about. Elsie is prepared to do whatever it takes to land the job—but will falling into Jack’s orbit where she can be her true self tempt her to put her most guarded theories of love into practice?

Ali Hazelwood is an automatic author for me, and I will read anything she writes! All of her books are so smart and funny, and Love, Theoretically was no different! I really liked the tension between Jack and Elsie. Their characters were so different but also so similar, and I loved the way their relationship grew. I also loved how Elsie grew individually throughout the book, and I loved her friendship with Cece. This book was more academic than her other works, but I really enjoyed that. I’m not much of a science or math person, but Hazelwood writes about STEM in a way that is fun, empowering, and  engaging (and that I don’t feel like I can’t understand what’s going on lol). The Olive and Adam cameo was the cherry on top!