Bridgerton got me into historical romance novels; Emily Henry got me into contemporary romance; Ali Hazlewood showed me what the genre could really do at its best.
Hazlewood is a pen name; she seems to have found the time to be both a professor of neuroscience and bestselling romance author and uses it to separate the two halves of her life. The fact that she does have this other life to draw on is key to why her books work so well. Her novels are mostly set within the world of STEM academia/research and it is this specific setting that grounds her emotionally charged plots. Her characters are all brilliant, funny, and emotionally unsure. Her men fall always first; often utterly consumed by a love that for varied reasons seems hopeless. They are always noble and strong and sensitive, and they all look exactly like Adam Driver but with the brains of Nikola Tesla.
Hazlewood is who I send people to when they are romance novel-curious but still hesitant. Her humor holds your hand through the rough bits and her sincerity keeps your heart locked in from the first word to the last. It’s porn for sapiosexuals (if that’s still a thing), basically.
Love, Theoretically: Set in the world of Boston-area physicists, this novel follows Elsie Hannaway, an adjunct professor who dreams of making a regular salary in a tenure-track position. To supplement her meagre income and try and pay for regular insulin, Elsie works as a “fake date for hire,” which is how she meets Jack Smith, the brother of one of her fake dating clients. When Elsie interviews for a position at Harvard and he happens to be on the hiring committee, her story of being a children’s librarian (and his brother’s girlfriend) falls to pieces. But oops, now that he knows she’s single and also a brilliant physicist like him his latent fascination for a girl he thought he couldn’t have quickly blooms into love. They argue theoretical vs experimental physics; they use Go as foreplay; they watch Twilight together in bed. This book is perfect.
This is Hazlewood’s third novel, but I am really using it as a stand-in for a type of romance novel she writes. Her first two books, The Love Hypothesis and Love on the Brain are very much in the same train as this one, and all three are set in the same universe with occasional overlapping character cameos. Read them all; thank me later.
Check & Mate: Mallory Greenleaf, recent high school grad and former chess prodigy, had decided she will never play chess again. Her family life is in a shambles, largely due to her time in chess (or so she tells herself) and she would rather work a steady job than try and follow her dreams. Then she gets an offer she can’t resist: to be payed to study and play chess again. When she comes across the reigning champion, Nolan Sawyer, she begins to understand that playing chess, growing up, falling in love, and accepting the past are all steps in a journey she needs to take. This novel is as much a coming of age story as it is a romance, although the romance at its heart it still as sincere and emotional as in any Hazlewood story. I was deeply moved by this novel; it’s about accepting that you can’t hide from your own bildungsroman. Also all my Queen’s Gambit chess obsession came roaring back.
In the past year, Hazlewood has put out two books that are different than her usual, the first being Check & Mate, a YA novel set in the world of competitive chess and Bride, which is a paranormal adult romance. Check & Mate has been marketed as a young adult novel, but is really further evidence that the distinctions between YA and adult novels are eroding faster than the Florida coastline. The main distinctions here are the characters are slightly younger than in her other novels and there is no detailed sex on the page. Sex still happens, but there’s a certain “fade to black” aspect to it that will be familiar to readers of upper YA. However, if you picked this up off the street and had no idea it was sold in one particular section of the bookstore, you would be hard-pressed to categorize it as a novel “meant for kids,” to be reductive. Still, it’s an interesting turn for Hazlewood, who continues to show she can play in different lanes.
Bride: Misery Lark is a vampire and Lowe Moreland is a werewolf, which means they should absolutely hate each other. But they also have to get married to preserve some fragile interspecies peace treaty, which is somewhat complicated by Misery’s hunt to find her missing best friend who was somehow connected to Lowe and the fact that Lowe is completely in love with Misery, chemically and emotionally.
This is Hazlewood’s most recent novel (released last week) and her most different. It is incredibly fun to see her playing in other romance novel sub-genre’s like this. She hits upon supernatural romance and “fated mates” romance (basically this person is your soulmate but in a like chemical attraction way), and the fact that her two main characters are a vampire and a werewolf, he is an alpha and sucking blood is hot… etc. There’s tropes galore in this novel, but used so skillfully and built upon the bedrock of good characters, good writing, and sincerity. There’s hints this novel will spawn a sequel, and I can only hope we get that and an Ali Hazlewood version of every romance subgenre out there, including but not limited to: sports romance, these fairies are just so hot romance, riding dragons into battle romance, Regency romance, Viking romance, cowboy romance, and gee everyone in this small town is so hunky romance.