A review by juliaegreene
Love on the Brain, by Ali Hazelwood

lighthearted fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

thoughts on this book:
  • i did not like bee. at all. she was super annoying, very stupid for someone with a PhD, and felt like a pick me/"not like other girls" kind of woman. i felt like she was only vegan for the sake of making her seem special and same thing with the whole running plotline. 
  • levi is a fine male lead. good, even. but ali writes him like his size is the only important quality about him for the first half of the book, and it just gets worse as bee gets to know him and they have sex (more on this later). hulking, towering, huge, massive, broad, big, tall, 6'4", oh my fucking god it never ended. and bee being like 5'2" just seemed ridiculous. overall, he seemed like a good guy, but all the shit with his family seemed unnecessary and he genuinely just needed to go to therapy (i feel like it was only mentioned that he'd gone before to make him more of a desirable Self Aware romantic lead). i normally love love love an obsessed male lead (go ahead, be a simp!!) but considering how long ago he fell for bee and the time in between that and the story, it just seemed weird and kind of creepy at times. like, why is she your phone passcode? do you even know her? ugh.
  • the miscommunications between the two of them were unreasonable. bee wearing her grandmother's ring ON HER RING FINGER was just dumb and created unnecessary tension for 2/3 of the book so that levi would think she was married to tim. 
    • side note: the whole fiance/cheating/best friend plot seemed thrown in only when it was convenient for the story or to keep levi and bee apart
  • i was not expecting them to be FWB, which again was an unnecessary miscommunication. she thinks he's just getting a crush out of his system, he wants her to move in. JUST TALK. OH MY GOD. 
  • okay, the sex: honestly, it was just cringey. ali's writing is a whole lot of things that i want to get into, but the sex scenes felt very immature at times and like she thought she was writing super deep and well in others. the way their size difference came into play made me really uncomfortable, and the way levi talked to bee and bee thought about him felt really possessive and steeped in gender roles. 
  • the plot itself (BLINK, guy, the way the romance progressed) felt very predictable. i've read the love hypothesis, so i felt like i knew what ali wanted to do from the beginning and could call what would happen when a character or issue was introduced for the most part. 
    • side note: the shmac thing was predictable but fine for the most part, though i did hate the huge paragraph that everyone was thirsting over. dude, why are you sending all that shit to A STRANGER? boundary: crossed
    • another side note: the cat? really? unnoticed in a NASA facility? and only to serve as a plot device when bee has A GUN pointed at her head? all of the plot climax was ridiculous and i didn't see the point. ali tried to go big and it really did not work for me.
  • ali's writing in this book was so much worse than TLH. the millennial humor, the galaxy leggings, the unprompted and honestly annoying interjections of rants on the GRE and marie curie that just overloaded the book, all of them could have been made into a drinking game that probably would have poisoned me before the halfway mark. my favorite thing to hate was the TM jokes that i think were supposed to be another quirk of bee's but instead made me want to scream. i unfortunately didn't have the ebook, so i couldn't search, but i counted 41 instances while reading the physical version. even 2 was too many. 
  • things i actually did like: wlw!! banter was not terrible at times! fuck standardized testing!! 
  • i finished this book last night, so i think i might need some time to process still, but as of right now i'm going to give love on the brain 1.5 or 2 stars. i originally was going to do 1, but i think the fact that it was such a fun experience to hate it should count for something.
  • fuck reylo all my homies hate reylo
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