Reviews with content warning for Murder - Love on the Brain

I really liked the leads' dynamic in this book, and I appreciate the science of it as a student of science myself. However, I found it harder to like Bee, the heroine, compared to some of Ali Hazelwood's other heroines like Olive from The Love Hypothesis and Mara from the novella Under One Roof. That being said, I found Levi, the hero, very attractive and highly appealing as a romantic interest. He was strong and secure, and I find good leadership to be attractive.

Spoiler

The order of events in the romantic plot was not my favorite. Nor were some of the plot points of the romantic plot. For one, I really hate the misunderstandings/miscommunication trope, and that was pretty central for a lot of the book. I include Bee and Levi not knowing they're Twitter friends in the components of this trope. I don't mind that they had sex before getting together, but this back and forth of will Bee let herself be in love or not was not for me. I generally don't prefer when the romantic resolution happens on the very last page, but I thought it worked better in The Love Hypothesis than in this book. In the last third or quarter of the book, everything felt like too much of a rollercoaster for my taste.

Content Warnings

khloereads86's review

Go to review page

emotional lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This was pretty good but I feel like a lot of it was pretty similar to The Love Hypothesis.

I liked Levi and Bee but I feel like there wasn’t enough about them in the book to really fall in love with them. The amount of Marie Curie references was honestly a bit much for me, Bee seemed a little too obsessed.

Spoiler

Also how the heck did Bee not realize that Levi liked her?? And Levi man, figure your stuff out. Communicate!!

I really love the women in STEM theme of these books and all the neuroscience stuff. Super interesting.

I was a bit caught off guard with the ending, even though I saw part of it coming. It seemed a little overdramatized to me.

Spoiler

I figured Guy was the one messing with the files and that Levi and Bee would figure out they were twitter friends, but the whole sabotaging-your-project, giving-himself-a-seizure, ruining-other-people’s-careers, trying-to-stage-a-suicide was a bit much. It wasn’t even like he was working for the other company or anything like that, and umm I thought he was supposed to be close to Levi (like really good friends!) so how did he end up trying to kill Levi’s girlfriend and no one noticed anything was off with him until after the fact??

I kind of wish we got more info about Lily and Penny too. It felt like they were just filler when they could have been really good characters if we got to see more actual interactions with them instead of brief descriptions and using them as a plot device.

Also wth was with Rocío? And Reike? They just seemed like really weird side characters. Some things Ro said were funny but most of the time it was just ??? Her friend Annie and her ex too, ugh why were there so many crappy side characters and plots?

Overall, I liked the book and was honestly more in to the romance in this than in TLH, but it was a bit weird and I think the story itself wasn’t as good.

Content Warnings

More...