A review by kumishona
Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

 FIRST, A QUICK ROMANCE NOVEL REVIEW!

spoiler: it wasn’t my favorite but I gave it a ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75 because being a writer has made me a generally more appreciative reader + I am so starved of woman in physics rep.

the good

• It just felt good to read about a woman physicist, who are still incredibly underrepresented in fiction, especially as protagonists. (I’ll go off about that in a minute.)
• The romance is so swoony with shoujo manga vibes, I haven’t read straight M/F adult romance novels in a while and I just loved the flutteriness of it.
• A couple of chapters were so soft with excellent pillowtalk. There was something about the ambience of the snow, the hypnotic sadness of failure, the prescence of a comforting person.
• I enjoyed identifying the relatable parts about physics academia. Hazelwood clearly did a lot of research, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. It definitely kept me reading!

the bad

• The academia issues are so over-simplified it’s almost juvenile. For an adult novel, even one marketed as a romcom, I expect more nuance, more explanations, more explicit lingering in tight positions.
• And then the romance tries to be complex (and has a lot of potential!) but not a lot of conflict really happens.
• A fictional physics fued between theorists and experimentalists is a really fun (and actually not far off) concept, but I would have expected some things to be the other way around. (More on that later!)
• Okay this is personal but the main couple both have terrible taste in movies. Twilight vs white male rage movies??? There is no lesser evil here
• Elsie’s hardships aren’t put in a very serious light. Her diabetes and lack of access to health insurance is used as a plot device to engineer romantic momentum between the characters and/or comic relief.
• Just overall, the book tried so hard to remain “light” that I think it fails to garner depth. Because adult lives really aren’t that light all the time, and a book can bring relaxation and joy whilst including real worldly negative experiences.
• There were aroace and sapphic side characters, but I wanted so bad for Elsie to be demisexual. It’s set up so perfectly only for it to be averted—As a demisexual person myself, Elsie’s feelings about attraction felt acutely familiar to me, and every other reader I’ve spoken to has agreed that the book took a dissapointing and unexpected turn. I understand Hazelwood may not feel equipped to write queer protagonists but if I were her editor, I would have flagged that and recommended she make it canon. It would have added so much more context and dimension to Elsie, and would’ve put hetero demisexuals on the map. </3
• Following up on the above: The smut tries so hard to be meaningful but it … really is icky, stereotypical, unrealistic allocishetero stuff. Think: the shy inexperienced girl vs the man who knows exactly how to advise her. The characters try to subvert the trope by calling it out, but it feels performative because all is forgotten in the next second. The PiV sex is weirdly conventionally idealistic considering the pairing’s size difference. I’m picky about smut but also forgiving when I do like the dynamic. I just didn’t here.
• Following up once again: I was ready to ignore all the repetitive comments about how sexy Jack’s height and muscles were, because sure, I guess Elsie has a type. But the sex scenes solidified the redundancy of it all. I’ve read this same dynamic in countless smutty heteronormative M/F paperbacks. And I have also been made aware by every Hazelwood reader that all her books focus on this kind of physical build pairing. I just want more diversity, you know?
• IDK, I just wanted more physics in here than complaining about teaching, glossed over toxic mentors, and using some quirky physics term in every other sentence. (More on that below!)
• I just wanted … more? It’s not an extremely short novel, but both the plot and the character development fell flat. The ups and downs were too fast and easy, and the placement felt off. I finished the book and wondered, “That’s it? That’s all that happened?” It just wasn’t fulfilling. The side characters aren’t expanded upon, and don’t get enough pagetime. My other romance reads this year were Bellefleur’s The Fiancee Farce and Mcquiston’s One Last Stop. In both of those novels, the drama was fleshed out with so much care and detail. In comparison, Love, Theoretically may mention similar social difficulties in passing, but failed to really, really show us.

Overall … the novel was fun for being about physicists but I really don’t see myself picking up another Hazelwood book, especially considering this isn’t even a debut novel. The conventional white steminist vibe and the particular allocishetero M/F dynamic just isn’t my thing.

But perhaps a reader wanting more of a novel and its characters is a good problem to have. Never say never, I guess! I look forward to keeping tabs on what Hazelwood publishes in the future!

NOW, ONTO THE PHYSICS!

First, most physicists, as good scientists, understand that theory and experimentation are fundamentally linked. It’s true that we each are often biased towards our own methods of research, but it is quite a stretch to imagine full professors so blatantly feud against others solely because of theory vs experimentation. Regardless, I was happy to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the plot that was framed in a genre-specific, lighthearted, humorous way.

Secondly, both theory and experimentation have sources of funding that are motivated in different ways, and Hazelwood’s decision to have the theorists struggle with funding cuts due to declining interest in pop culture/the general public is actually quite credible. Experimentation garners a lot more interest from the application and engineering end of society, parts that are easily fueled by capitalism.

However, I think experimentalists in general are far less likely to be mean to theorists than the reverse scenario. Dr Fatima Abdurrahman has a great video essay about that called on her YouTube channel called “Quantum Physics, Feminism, and Objective Reality: What Physicists Don’t Want You to Know About Quantum Mechanics.” Dr Fatima outlines how old white men in physics have maintained this image of unwavering scientific objectivity in the name of rigor, despite studying a field that fundamentally is barely fathomable for humans. In simpler terms: Men, even in theory, pretend to be better, smarter, and more valid as physicists despite being in an infamously iffy field. And I would have liked to see that represented. It was just really hard for me to buy narcissistic grad students mansplaining Elsie about her field, and Elsie’s righteous feminine rage, when the field in question is … physics theory? It just didn’t make sense to me, when all of my personal experiences point to the opposite.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and having a woman theorist in a physics field that’s less popsci-oriented is actually … really cool. And having her love interest be a man in experimentation … sort of subverts gender roles and conventional media expectations.

Let me explain. The reality is that when women are represented in STEM, media prefers to put them in biology, like a nurse to a doctor, a people-oriented nurturer, a mere sidekick to the real “objective” scientist—often a mathematician or an astrophysicist who is always a man. And when women are placed in physics, they are automatically assigned to observational astronomy, which is dismissed as passive and easy. (This is wildly untrue—though styles of research in astronomy has interestingly allowed a somewhat more diverse array of researchers in history. Even today, you’ll see a higher frequency of women and queer people in every astronomy department.)

I think my ideal version of this novel would be retaining Elsie in theory, while also making theorists the overall bad guys in the feud. I would love to have her talk about the unique sexism she faces as a theorist. I would kill for a scene in which Jack gets gobsmacked by how fucking good at math she really is, compared to him (instead of, like, only making fun of it like it’s easy). I would love to read about her getting a tour of his lab, and just more physics content. But maybe I’m the only one saying that, because I’m a physicist. Maybe Hazelwood simplified it all to keep the book appealing to the general masses.

Still, it all read more like a girlpower!!! chant rather than a real commitment to represent a woman in STEM. I savored every moment Elsie or George would go off about physics. I loved Elsie’s conversations with Olive, a different STEM academic. (Monica was more complicated and actually quite interesting, and I wish we could have seen more of her. Heck, I wish we had actually been given any tangible info about Jack’s mom, even.) But I genuinely felt these instances were rare. Elsie referred to being a physicist a lot (and frankly, her mind is more physics-y than any IRL physicist considering the sheer number of physics-inspired figures of speech she uses … but I excused that as silly comic relief, a quirk in Hazelwood’s writing style). But she didn’t tangibly do physics on page. It was disappointing, considering women characters in STEM is what Hazelwood is known for.

And there are physicists who love teaching—even physicists who solely want to teach. Physicists who do pedagogy research. I know the book was mainly trying to criticise the adjunctification and dismissal of physics higher education, and it’s actually quite accurate in representing that most physicists in academia would prefer not to teach. But the excecution also ends up erasing physicists who aren’t in academia just for research. And I say this especially because the validity of teaching physicists as physicists is dismissed in real life. It’s used as justification to further force all physics academics to try to juggle between both research and teaching, whether they want to or not.

Which leads us to bad mentors. I’ve had a bunch of those. As Olive pointed out in an excellent quote, “Academia is so hierarchical, you know? There are all these people who have power over you, who are supposed to guide you and help you become the best possible scientist, but . . . sometimes they don’t know what’s best. Sometimes they don’t care. Sometimes they have their own agenda. […] Sometimes they’re total shitbuckets who deserve to step on a pitchfork and die.” And the thing is, the novel really doesn’t show us any of that (perhaps other than in Monica). We don’t fully get to know what happened to Jack’s mom, or Olive. We are not shown what Dr L’s agenda really was. Their final confrontation was so quick and anticlimactic despite all the build-up, when in reality shitty mentors are often sticky and entwined with your work, hard to cut off and scarier to talk back to even after you’ve finally realized they’re toxic.

Which isn’t to say the novel is just inadequate about everything. It’s correct in how goofy physics faculty are, and how white man-dominated the field is, how students try to mansplain women profs, how theorists madly work on their computers (as an experimentalist, I could never understand), how publishing is finicky (to put it kindly), and how tenured faculty fail to understand the reality of the job market in academia today. There are certain parts (like the quote above!) where I felt incredibly seen as part of a minoritized identity group in STEM academia. It’s rare to have a book written from this PoV, and as a first I think this novel will always be special for me!

If you’re interested in reading about more fictional women physicists, I would highly recommend skimming through this list I made on GoodReads (and feel free to add more!).

And if you’d like to support memoirs and science communication books by IRL women physicists, then look to further than this other list I’ve also made. (We’re actually currently seeing a boom in these which is inanely exciting to me, so again, contributions are always welcome!)