emma

Add friend

https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/eulrch

https://www.goodreads.com/eulrch

emma’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1290)
currently-reading‎ (3)
read‎ (749)
did-not-finish‎ (6)
paused‎ (3)
nonfiction‎ (230)
short-stories‎ (128)
mimi-recs‎ (57)
sapphic-read‎ (57)

jsh-recs‎ (50)
revisiting-childhood‎ (49)
arc-reads‎ (47)
laq-recs‎ (46)
cmu-recs‎ (36)
need-to-review‎ (36)
dark-academia-ish‎ (30)
favorite-overall‎ (30)
2024-five-stars‎ (26)

eco-fiction‎ (26)
required-reading‎ (24)
feminism‎ (23)
2025-five-stars‎ (22)
favorite-sff‎ (20)
ex-catholic-bitches-unite‎ (17)
latam-translated‎ (16)
towards-better-science‎ (16)
favorite-romance‎ (15)

physics-cosmology‎ (15)
favorite-nonfiction‎ (13)
2022-best-of-month‎ (12)
2023-best-of-month‎ (12)
2025-queer-book-club‎ (12)
botm‎ (6)
2026-five-stars‎ (4)
and-other-stories‎ (3)
book-length-fic‎ (1)

Stats | More…

emma is Currently Reading

emma is currently reading

Love on the Brain

by Ali Hazelwood (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 3rd time

read in July 2023

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

emma said: " my favorite kinds of romances are those that feel like they could happen in the real world. romances filled with believable and three-dimensional characters who have their own complex motivations and backstories. this book, however? not that.

i can a my favorite kinds of romances are those that feel like they could happen in the real world. romances filled with believable and three-dimensional characters who have their own complex motivations and backstories. this book, however? not that.

i can appreciate what ali hazelwood was going for here. women with intense and high-profile academic careers don’t feature super prominently in romance, except maybe to be the controlling and tightly-wound villainous ex in a hallmark movie. it’s fun to see a character like bee, who is undeniably accomplished and intelligent, also get to be silly and quirky and have her own moment to shine at the center of her life’s romantic drama. but in the end, too many elements of love on the brain require me to just completely suspend my belief—about how academia functions, about how real actual people interact with one another, about just how clueless a neuroscientist can actually be—and i’m coming away from this book confident that it is my least favorite of ali hazelwood’s novels.

99% of the reasons that i don’t like this book boil down to the fact that i really never felt particularly interested in bee or levi, for completely different reasons. like most of ali hazelwood’s MMCs, levi has zero appreciable personality, other than what appears to be infinite patience for bee’s emotional constipation and a passion for 🕺science🕺. not giving him more personality or any POV in the novel was such a missed opportunity, since he was absolutely carrying the tension, pining, and angst.

bee is frustrating for a whole host of other reasons. for one, ali hazelwood tries to have it all by writing in a very intimate first person but also needing to let the reader in on levi’s emotions for bee without bee picking up on them herself. the natural consequence of this is that bee spends 85% of the book being absolutely clueless about the fact that levi (shocker!) is not holding an extremely mature and adult grudge against her for being (checks notes) ugly and repulsive. this emotional blindness goes on for so long that even after bee and levi have been sleeping together for several weeks, the couple has had little to no emotional or actual romantic development. the relationship stagnates for kind of a long time in this really confusing grey-area between friends-with-benefits and an actual relationship, and the miscommunication-turned-third-act-breakup is obvious from a mile away. (to be fair, this is not all bee’s fault. literally one single ✨open and honest✨ conversation from levi about his emotions could have resolved things MUCH more quickly. but here we are.)

the last 15% of the book also manages to veer off into a completely bizarre direction that feels like it’s straight out of a cartoon, for absolutely no reason. it feels like someone read the love hypothesis and then told ali hazelwood that it was great, but needed an attempted murder sub-plot and about 6,000 more cat puns to really land. it’s just goofy, and also manages to overshadow anything that ali hazelwood is trying to say about misogyny in academia by also throwing evil astronauts with guns at the situation. it’s also just funny to me that these books are marketed as some kind of revolutionary STEM-inist perspective on romance just because the FMC is a woman in STEM who experiences misogyny, since all of bee’s problems are taken care of by levi stepping in for her. something just rubs me the wrong way about the MMC being a one-size-fits-all solution to all of the personal and professional issues facing the FMC, and it happens constantly in ali hazelwood’s novels.

this is also 100% personal preference, but i HATE the way that ali hazelwood writes her sex scenes. they’re just so incredibly uncomfortable and rely way too much on bee’s sexual inexperience and the over-exaggerated size difference between levi and bee. i’m sure they’re doing it for someone, but i am not that person. ...more "

progress:

(page 0 of 368)
"this is historically my least favorite ali hazelwood novel, and yet i am gripped by the sudden need to reread it" — Apr 05, 2024 12:01AM

Apr 16, 2024 07:06PM · see review