Dr. Bee Konigswasser's not your average romcom heroine. A purple-haired, pierced, and tattooed neuroscientist who runs an anonymous Twitter account called What Would Marie (Curie) Do?, she gets freaked out by spiders and stress and passes out at the drop of a hat. Now, as someone who's fainted a time or two, I couldn't help but wonder how she made it through all those tattoos and piercings. Because the mere thought of needles has me reaching for my smelling salts. Then again, Bee is a conundrum of contradictions. And that's part of what makes Ali Hazelwood's Love on the Brain so much fun to read.
Much like its predecessor, The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain is an enemies-to-lovers love story that's also about being a woman in male-dominated STEM. So when seemingly surly engineer Levi Ward turns out to be Bee's ally in co-leading a high-profile project at NASA, it's more than the setup for an office romance. It's an "I see you" moment for women, a kind of reimagining of the mutual respect and, okay, (alleged) lust that combusted between Marie and Pierre. And that's the kind of devotion that Bee's looking for. She's been orphaned, cheated on, and betrayed, all traumas that feed her need for true love -- but also her fear of it.
Hazelwood tackles loss, misogyny, and even standardized testing (I'm looking at you, GREs) with wit and levity, making Love on the Brain a dopamine fix with depth. Also, there's a character who carries a watermelon-shaped purse. So Hazelwood's next novel, Love, Theoretically, which comes out next week, is on my TBR list.
Because I love love -- especially when it shares the spotlight with feminism and fashion.