by “Bee Königswasser lives by a simple code: What would Marie Curie do? If NASA offered her the lead on a neuroengineering project – a literal dream come true – Marie would accept without hesitation. Duh. But the mother of modern physics never had to co-lead with Levi Ward.
Sure, Levi is attractive in a tall, dark, and piercing-eyes kind of way. But Levi made his feelings toward Bee very clear in grad school – archenemies work best employed in their own galaxies far, far away.
But when her equipment starts to go missing and the staff ignore her, Bee could swear she sees Levi softening into an ally, backing her plays, seconding her ideas… devouring her with those eyes. The possibilities have all her neurons firing.
But when it comes time to actually make a move and put her heart on the line, there’s only one question that matters: What will Bee Königswasser do?”
summary courtesy of Goodreads
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ / ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
I really wish I could give this book five stars. I had fun reading it, was sucked in from page one, and loved our protagonist, Bee Königswasser. Despite all that, I have to give it a ⅗ because it truly felt like The Love Hypothesis but a little off-center. Not only did Love on the Brain feel like a remix of Hazelwood’s debut novel, but a lot of plot points were very similar to The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. It was at times so striking that it took me out of the story, making me more focused on drawing connections to other works. Levi is basically a brown-haired version of Josh Templeton, from the inability to communicate stemming from stilted parental relationships to the long-term huge nearly obsessive crush on the female MC. Luckily I didn’t mind it too much, since Josh is one of my top fave male romantic leads of all time. Seriously, he’s up there with Mr Darcy for me. Something that was a little less forgivable was the copy-paste plot from Hazelwood’s debut to her sophomore novel.
SPOILERS LAY AHEAD SO BRACE YOURSELF!
Our romantic leads get together at an academic conference, just like in The Love Hypothesis. The best friend of the male protagonist, spoiler alert, is the villain. A gun is randomly whipped out with little to no foreshadowing. I could tell that Guy, Levi’s friend and an astronaut, was going to be the bad guy in the story, but the extent to which he suddenly went off the rails felt abrupt and unrealistic. The arc of Bee and Levi’s relationship hit all the same peaks and valleys that Olive and Adam’s did – I knew exactly what kind of conflict would happen and when.
Another not really gripe but quandary that I have is with the characters and their cookie-cutter nature. Bee is teeny tiny, so skinny, so cute, so quirky, and Levi is a mammoth man that is freakishly large in every possible way. Gigantic guy, tiny girl. I get it. It’s a formula that works. I understand the urge to use this trope, and I understand that a lot of Hazelwood’s work is souped-up Reylo fanfiction, which no doubt adds to the continuing use of this theme in her work. I also want to make absolutely clear that I don’t discount the quality of Hazelwood’s writing because of its background in fanfiction. Actually, I believe that it’s this that gives Hazelwood an edge and has granted her the undeniable smashing success that she’s had in the romance genre in the last few years. I only wish that Hazelwood would try to get a little outside of her box in terms of character design, and maybe mix it up a little with the plot points.
I realize that it sounds like I disliked this book, and that’s completely untrue! I enjoyed reading Love on the Brain. I loved Bee (we so seldom get romantic female leads with tattoos and piercings, and I loved that the jewelry she wore in her septum was being described as it was changed). Levi, as I’ve said, is a dreamy romantic lead who stands up with some of the top literary romantic heroes for me. The bottom line is that after Hazelwood’s first smash hit I came into this book expecting something that would knock me off my feet. Instead, I found a perfectly lovely and respectable romance novel that I’m sure I’ll return to for years to come. It isn’t a sin to be respectable, and this is not a failure by Hazelwood by any means. I just hope that her next novel (which I will most certainly be reading) has a few more surprises for us.
