If Ahn is her best friend, why can’t they just have a sensible conversation about this? Olive is an orphan and has some heavy baggage around being alone and losing people. Second, really? This is how she chooses to manage the situation? Olive then compounds the confusion by telling increasingly ludicrous lies to keep Ahn in the dark.īut why is it so important for Olive to convince Ahn that she’s dating? Alas, if you’re looking for solid reasoning, you won’t find it here. Not to mention the graduate student/professor part. First, not sure how I feel about just randomly kissing people… so that’s a little iffy for me. Here, I need to hit the brakes for a second, on two counts. And that person is none other than Professor Adam Carlsen. What does Olive do? She kisses the first person she sees. Does Olive expect to see Ahn in the corridor of the bio lab at the exact moment that she is supposed to be on her date? No. Why is this lie so important? Olive wants her best friend to be happy and she knows that Ahn is deeply infatuated with Jeremy, so she tells Ahn that she’s going on a date with someone else. In order to convince Ahn that Olive is no longer interested (actually, never was interested) in Jeremy, Olive decides to tell a little lie: Olive has moved on.

You know who does have sparks with Jeremy? Olive’s best friend: Ahn. She went on a couple dates with Jeremy, a fellow grad student, but there were precisely no sparks. Olive is a graduate student in the Biology lab at Stanford. This is a slightly creaky but charming romantic comedy that had me smiling at the pages.

I had squirreled it away in my TBR knowing that the publication date was only in September (HOW are we past September already?!) and past me did present me a real solid in that respect. This was a read that was worth waiting for. Well, colour me pink and call me tickled. CW: There is an instance of sexual assault towards the end of the book.

Book the love hypothesis