
Love, Theoretically
- Themes
- Academic ambition, People-pleasing and identity, Romantic connection
Who it’s for
- For readers who enjoy STEM-set romantic comedies and academic rivalry.
- For readers who enjoy fake-dating romance and workplace tension.
Where it sits
How strongly BookFrontier reads the book as belonging to each subject.
Nearest books
Closest matches from our semantic model, which compares what books are about, then ordered by what their readers also loved. Most of these share its genres: Romantic Comedy and Contemporary Romance.
Funny StoryEmily Henry60% matchAlso shares Fake-Dating Romance
The American Roommate ExperimentElena Armas59% matchAlso shares Fake-Dating Romance
Happy PlaceEmily Henry57% match
Love on the BrainAli Hazelwood78% match
Book LoversEmily Henry59% match
The Spanish Love DeceptionScarlette Hayes, Elena Armas58% matchAlso shares Fake-Dating Romance
The Seven Year SlipAshley Poston60% match
The Love HypothesisAli Hazelwood75% matchAlso shares Fake-Dating Romance
For younger readers: Check & Mate, The Do-over, Today Tonight Tomorrow
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"The reigning queen of STEM romance."—The Washington Post
An Indie Next and Library Reads Pick!
Rival physicists collide in a vortex of academic feuds and fake dating shenanigans in this delightfully STEMinist romcom from the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis and Love on the Brain.
The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her.
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By day, she’s an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people-pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs.
Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down. Because Jack Smith, the annoyingly attractive and arrogant older brother of her favorite client, turns out to be the cold-hearted experimental physicist who ruined her mentor’s career and undermined the reputation of theorists everywhere. And he’s the same Jack Smith who rules over the physics department at MIT, standing right between Elsie and her dream job.
Elsie is prepared for an all-out war of scholarly sabotage but…those long, penetrating looks? Not having to be anything other than her true self when she’s with him? Will falling into an experimentalist’s orbit finally tempt her to put her most guarded theories on love into practice?
Publisher details
Publisher categories
- Contemporary Romance
- Romantic Comedy
- Workplace Romance
- Authors
- Ali Hazelwood
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- June 13, 2023
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Contemporary Romance