Love on the Brain Review

E-Book, 368 Pages
Adult/ Contemporary Romance
By: Ali Hazelwood
Rating: 🌟🌟

Before I start this ranty review, I am going to remind you that I gave The Love Hypothesis 4.5 stars and it was on my top ten favorite books of 2021. I had high expectations for this one that started decreasing gradually when I read the novellas and it still ended up disappointing me.

Surprisingly too, I only learned about TLH from all the rave reviews it was getting and I saw it everywhere. it now has over 600K ratings and those are some crazy numbers in the book world. When I finished this one and went to rate it on GR, I noticed that many readers were also disappointed which made me feel less bad for not enjoying it.

The main reason why I did not like it was because I was hoping that we don’t get another huge guys meet smol (yes with an o) girl story and I was only 3% in when I read those descriptions:

“I remember! Wasn’t he like . . . hot? Tall? Built?”

&

Reike and I are both short and slight.

That was the first eye roll I gave and there were plenty of those coming. At this point I knew that I have read all of Hazelwood’s past books, my current read and also all of her future books. The author obviously has a mold that she sticks to and it is tiny girl (I would imagine her having Smoliv as a Pokemon trainer) who is a scientist, hasn’t had sex in ages, has colored hair and loves Marie Curie and usually has a contact living abroad. The guy is Mr.Perfect, tall, brooding, the smartest guy ever and has the most defined abs and muscles and is so caring (If there is a guy like that in real life do tell me). I am not joking when I knew where the story was going from 4% in the book ( I checked for this exact reason).

So what I am trying to say that the characters are very stereotyped, very two dimensional and boring. Levi, Adam, Liam are all the same and the same goes for Bee, Mara and Olive. Also they kept telling us how Bee is one of the smartest neuroscientists yet she failed to notice some very obvious things.

I did not enjoy the prose with this novel. I did not highlight quotes worth mentioning in this review because it felt like it was forced and the humor did not work well for me because it felt cartoonish and there were some points where It was not realistic to say those things.

Summary: Hazelwood is currently a very successful author -I am happy for her- but if she wants to continue being so she has to get out of her comfort zone and write something different. The characters and the plot in this novel were photocopies of what we had in TLH and the novellas. The prose was just okay and overall it was an underwhelming read. I am not gonna read her next book unless people read it and say it is different.