Review: Love to Loathe You by Ali Hazelwood

 

Title: Love to Loathe You {The STEMinist novellas #1-3}

Author: Ali Hazelwood

Published: 10th January 2023, Sphere

Status: Read January 2023 courtesy Hachette Australia

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My Thoughts:

Having read great things about Ali Hazelwood’s debut, The Love Hypothesis, and her sophomore novel, Love on the Brain, I couldn’t resist the lure of Love to Loathe You, a collection of three novella’s, which have previously been published separately. Each novella works as a standalone, however they are linked in that they each feature one of three best friends, Mara, Sadie and Hannah, who are in regular contact across all of the story’s .

In Under One Roof, Mara, an environmental engineer who has just landed her dream job at the Environmental Protective Agency, inherits half ownership in a Washington DC house from her late mentor, and learns she’ll be sharing it with her mentor’s great nephew, a lawyer for an oil company. Liam isn’t pleased to be sharing his space with a stranger, and the two try to stay out of each other’s way, but their forced proximity soon breaks down the walls between them. Probably my favourite of the three novellas, I particularly enjoyed the well-paced build up of romantic tension between Mara and Liam.

Miscommunication is at the root of the conflict between civil engineer Sadie, and Erik, a partner in a large rival firm, in Stuck With You. The couple meet at a nearby cafe and enjoy a long night together, leaving Sadie excited for future possibilities, until she is told Erik’s firm has poached the important client she had high hopes of signing. Three weeks later the two are trapped in an elevator together and Sadie is ready to tell him exactly what she thinks of him. I liked the dual timeline structure of this story, and the respect Erik showed for Sadie, though I think a steamy elevator scene would have been the icing on the cake.

Below Zero is a second-chance romance featuring Hannah, an ambitious aerospace engineer, and Ian, her boss at NASA. When Hannah learns that her proposed project has been rejected by Ian, despite widespread support from her colleagues, Hannah suspects Ian’s motive is revenge, but when she is left stranded in a crevasse in the Arctic it’s Ian who rescues her, despite the dangers. By sheer coincidence, Bonnie Tyler’s song ‘Holding Out for a Hero’ started playing as I was reading this, and it’s the perfect anthem for this novella (especially the last verse). Hannah, whose cynicism hides her poor self esteem, is the prickliest of the three friends, and I couldn’t help but root for her to take a chance.

Though each novella has its own epilogue, the Bonus Chapter included in Love to Loathe You, which contains a few pages from each of the men’s point of view at a future date, is just that, a charming bonus that I appreciated.

Witty, fun and heated (the sex is reasonably explicit), Love to Loathe You proved to be an excellent escapist read for me, Hazelwood has a new fan and I’m looking forward to reading Love, Theoretically which will be released later this year.

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