We’re back with Ali Hazelwood! And this may be one of my favorite Ali Hazelwood books. While it has the trope I cannot stand, I really liked the relationship between Rue and Eli. Keep reading this book review of Not in Love for my full thoughts.
Summary
Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down.
Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through – and he’s a man who gets what he wants. With one burning exception: Rue. The woman he can’t stop thinking about. The woman who’s off-limits to him.
Torn between loyalty and an undeniable attraction, Rue and Eli throw caution out the lab and the boardroom windows. Their affair is secret, no-strings-attached, and has a built-in deadline: the day one of their companies will prevail. But the heart is risky business – one that plays for keeps.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
I always fall into Ali Hazelwood books. There’s something about these STEM stories with witty banter and delicious spice. They always get me. We love a good “let’s get this out of our system” end date to an affair. We also love a good, “the guy who I saw last night is now my rival or enemy in the morning”. It has all the hallmarks of the romance tropes we eat up. And while I, predictably, loved that I could not stand the “secret I have that is going to ruin someone, but I never think about it so I never tell the readers”. Is this just me??
Seriously. Does it just bother me? If there was this one big secret that I couldn’t tell someone, I’d be thinking about it ALL the time I saw them. And you bet it’d be in my brain. But for the sake of this review, I’ll forget this pet peeve. Not in Love‘s relationship dynamics were impeccable. We love two characters who can’t help but share their messiness, their vulnerabilities, and insecurities. The people who just get under our skin and we have to share.
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People who see us for who we are and wouldn’t have it any other way. Orbits we cannot escape. We also love characters who deny their falling in love feels. It’s a romance story which cuts to the heart of what we love about romance stories. The leap of trust, of faith, to know someone, to trust them. This is my favorite of Ali Hazelwood’s adult books for sure. It’s academia tangent and the friendship group is superb!
Find Not in Love on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.