Penguin Random House Audio – Review: 5 Stars

Thanks so much to the author, Penguin Random House Audio, and Libro.fm for the gifted advanced audio copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts. All opinions are entirely my own. { partner } My reviews can also be found on Instagram @Tackling_TBR and on Goodreads.

Publication Date: June 13, 2023

Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Adult, Fiction

Audiobook Length: 12 hours 33 minutes

TW: description of sexual harassment, controlling behaviors and gaslighting

Alright, full disclosure –
The Love Hypothesis and Love on the Brain are both sitting and smiling at me from my bookshelf as I write this, but I have yet to read either one.
So while they are all very much different sides of the same thought and spiritual successors of the ones before, I will be talking about Love, Theoretically purely as a stand alone story.
That being said, I have also seen a bit of talk online about how these three books are very similar, and some readers are taking issue with that, or enjoying the book less for it. Since this is the first of them that I’m reading, I won’t be including any of that either.

Now that all of that is out of the way, I really enjoyed it!

While I have not ever considered a career in STEM (my brain just does NOT work that way, and I tend to think that most folks in STEM are actually wizards of some sort), I could really find myself relating a lot to Elsie in a lot of ways. Throughout the story she tends to change seemingly small things about herself or shifting her personality in order to fit into groups or situations – I used to do a lot of that when I was younger, and still feel myself doing it subconsciously every once in a while, so I found it a really fun aspect of her character to read about.

I also can’t review this book without mentioning that I listened to it on audio, and the audiobook was wonderful! The narrator’s voice is so lovely, and I thought that she did a really wonderful job with separating the different characters in any given scene. You aren’t going to be fooled into thinking that it’s a full movie cast or anything like that, but I didn’t have any problems with knowing which character was talking which can sometimes be an issue. Definitely recommend it in an audio format!

Overall I thought that this book was a really fun, fairly light and quick listen, and I would definitely recommend it to friends and fellow readers. I think that the best way to read this book would be sitting in a park or a cafe with plenty of opportunities to people-watch – I’m not sure why, but that’s what Elsie’s personality matching made me want to do. Or you could do what I did and just listen to it during a slow day and a half of desk work!

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