Love, Theoretically

Ali Hazelwood's books run on one reliable reactor, the enormous scientist and the woman who out-thinks him, and Love, Theoretically is the desk's pick for the model's best build: the funniest of her novels, the angriest about academia, and the one that uses the fake-dating framework to carry an actual thesis about performing versions of yourself for survival. Readers who met Hazelwood through her famous debut should know this one runs deeper on every axis the desk grades.

Elsie Hannaway is a theoretical physicist in the adjunct trenches, stitching a living out of three universities' worth of teaching and a side hustle as a professional fake girlfriend, a job she is alarmingly good at because her core skill, honed since childhood, is becoming whatever the room requires. The two lives collide with great precision. The MIT faculty interview that could end her precarity turns out to feature, on the hiring committee, one Jack Smith — experimental physicist, older brother of her most regular fake-dating client, and, in the book's best structural joke, the man who as a young researcher published the takedown that discredited her entire subfield and her idol along with it. Jack has also, inconveniently, met the real Elsie in the wild, which makes him the only person alive who can tell when she is performing. He appears to prefer when she is not. This is a problem, because Elsie without the performance is a person she has never risked in public.

The desk's affection is for what Hazelwood does with the theory-versus-experiment war, which becomes the romance's actual language: a man who trusts only what can be measured courting a woman who lives entirely in models, each converting the other by degrees. The academic satire is drawn from life and it shows — the adjunct economics, the diet-Coke-fuelled interview circuit, the grant politics — and Elsie's rage, when she finally stops metabolising it as accommodation, is the book's true climax.

Honest notices: Hazelwood's house tropes are all present and unashamed, the size difference, the oblivious pining, the single catastrophic misunderstanding; readers allergic to the brand should calibrate. Heat is high, late, and characteristically enthusiastic. Content notes for diabetes management under financial strain, handled well.

Who is this for? Academics current and recovering, fake-dating readers who want the fakery examined, and anyone who has ever been the version of themselves the room ordered. The desk assigns it with tenure. Within the Hazelwood shelf this is the desk's ranked first, ahead of the famous debut, and we are prepared to defend the ranking at any departmental meeting with slides. The committee will come around. They always do.