Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m back with a new release (well it was released in February and I read it in February so that counts as new release) romance for this week’s Book of the Week.
The heroine of Love and Other Brain Experiments is Frances, a neuroscientist who has spent the last five years trying to build her career after turning down a job – and her boyfriend – to follow her own research. Now she’s heading back to New York to a conference, where she’s going to come face to face with that same ex, who said she’d never make it on her own. When an argument with a rival is mistaken for an argument between a couple, she’s flustered and inadvertently confirms the misconception and suddenly both her and Lewis’s careers are at risk – and thus starts the fake dating agreement…
My favourite Sophie Kinsella book is Can You Keep a Secret, which starts with a genius scene set on a plane, and this also starts with an excellent plane-based meeting which set me up to really enjoy this. I had a slight concern with the fake dating scenario – because as the book sets it out Frances’s main problem with the initial relationship misconception is gaining a reputation for untruthfulness in science (where falsifying data is the worst thing you can do) but then she and Lewis create a much bigger reputational risk with the prolonged fake dating scenario. However, I love a fake dating story, and an enemies to lovers plot and this is so much fun that I just decided to go with it and hope that the resolution was well thought out and satisfying enough to negate that fear – and it basically was.
Frances is a great character – I loved all the details about the different places she’d worked in around the world and her complete single minded focus on her research made a great foil for her missing some issues in her real life outside of the lab. I thought Lewis was also really well drawn, although the reason why he and Frances became rivals seemed pretty unsurmountable initially, the actual explanation made it work. There is a slight case of just have a proper conversation you two here, but ultimately I raced through this in about 36 hours and ended with a big smile on my face at the resolution. This is Hannah Brohm’s debut – and this is a really accomplished start to a romance writing career and I look forward to seeing what she writes next. And on a more basic level this was one of the first STEM romances that I’ve read recently that wasn’t completely obviously a Reylo thing…
I got my copy of Love and Other Brain Experiments from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback – and as you can see I’ve already found it in a Waterstones – so it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 