Not in Love: A welcome evolution

Author: Ali Hazelwood

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

After her first few books featuring women in STEM, most of whom were grad students or recent PhDs, Ali Hazelwood branched out into other variations of contemporary romance including YA and paranormal. But in Not in Love, she brings us back to the core format she was first known for, with some new elements and some familiar patterns.

This book follows Rue, a chemical engineer working at a startup in Austin, Texas. Through a series of coincidences involving a dating app and a private equity takeover, she meets Eli. While she’s instantly attracted to Eli, his company has just bought the loan for the startup she works for, potentially threatening her job, her life’s work and her beloved mentor. But despite all this, she can’t stop thinking about him.

This book, refreshingly, goes beyond the “all men in STEM are evil” theme that pervaded many of Hazelwood’s previous books. There’s still an appropriate amount of man-bashing pointing out the real systemic challenges women face in STEM fields and how men negatively contribute to those challenges, but this time not only do we get a different kind of story, we get a first for Hazelwood’s books: dual POV.

While I have loved all of Ali Hazelwood’s previous books, and she is an auto-buy author for me, I realised that the missing male POV in her previous books contributed to the male love interests feeling less like fully-formed people and more like nerdy-but-hunky fantasies who exist for the FMC rather than being fully-formed people themselves. An additional POV in this case means that we get real insight into Eli’s thoughts, and he has his own character arc and struggles he has to deal with, which adds depth to the story. Dual-POV isn’t always necessary in romances, but it can help add layers to a story that can sometimes feel shallow and one-sided.

In addition to this new aspect, I also enjoyed Rue and Eli as characters as well as the relationship between them. Rue definitely had some unnamed neurodivergence going on, and I liked the way Eli responded to that and made her feel comfortable.

Though this one was different than her “classic” mile-a-minute rom-coms, I thoroughly enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind seeing more books in this vein in the future.