Loathe to Love You by
Ali Hazelwood
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
Three novella featuring STEM heroines who happen to be BFFs.
Under One RoofMara is left a beautiful house by her mentor, Helen. But when she goes to claim it she discovers she has only inherited part of the house and it is already occupied by one of Helen's distant relatives, Liam. Not only that, the occupant is a lawyer for a big-oil company and Mara's personal nemesis. When his attempts to buy Mara out with obscene amounts of money fail the two of them settle into a hostile cohabitation arrangement, each doing everything they can to annoy the other (playing Disney tunes very loud, washing up at 3am, etc).
Things start to change when Mara discovers that Liam did not (as she previously assumed) hate his aunt, indeed she was witness to a call he made to Helen shortly before she died. As the two of them bond over their love for her, they begin to fall for each other.
Three stars. Pleasant enough but I'm not sure what motivated Liam to be such a jerk at the outset.
Stuck With YouSadie is an engineer. Her worst nightmare is realised when she gets stuck in the smallest elevator at work with non-other than her former lover, turned enemy, Erik who works for a rival engineering company, big-engineering if such a thing existed.
Sadie and Erik met over a stale croissant and spent a wonderful day together, until Erik betrayed her terribly and broke her heart. Can these two crazy kids uncover the truth about what really happened while in forced proximity?
I kind of liked this. However, having read some other reviews I can see the recurring motifs more clearly in this novella. Yes, apparently all her heroines are five feet tall while all the men are over six feet tall and generally described as 'mountains' or similar. So far both heroes have been outwardly successful and confident but hidden insecurities which didn't really gel with their hard-hitting, go-getting jobs. Also, so far both women have been firmly employed on the side of environmentally-friendly, independent organisations whereas both men have been employed by, if not the Dark Side then close.
Three stars.
Below ZeroHannah was failing High School, a true rebel without a cause, until a pathetic chat-up line from another student piques her interest in space (specifically, why would sunsets be blue on Mars, aka the Red Planet?). From then on Hannah was fascinated by space and dreamed of joining NASA.
Hannah is in a remote area of Norway testing out equipment for the next Mars expedition in an environment as close as to that of Mars as can be achieved on Earth, but she has slipped and fallen down a crevasse, twisted her ankle, and her only hope of rescue is the man who vetoed the funding for her invention in the first place.
I think this could have worked better as a full length novella as Hannah appeared to have a lot of backstory which was never properly explored, like why she only does one-night stands and feels that people would get bored of her/disgusted by her if they got to know her - I think this would have worked better if perhaps we had seen this rather than being told it.
Ian, a distant relative of Mara's, was an infant prodigy, a member of the Mars Curiosity Rover team at the tender age of eighteen. Mara pulls a few family strings to get Ian to agree to be interviewed by Hannah for a paper she has to write for college (interview someone who has your dream job) and it's instalurve. Like all the other men in this anthology Ian is significantly larger than Hannah but also totally smitten, despite Hannah giving him the brush-off after their first encounter.
Also three stars.
I have to say I don't think this works as an anthology because it just highlights the same-same nature of the novellas even to the fact that every one of them is told in alternating present day and flashbacks, which always makes me suspicious that the story wouldn't hold together if told in chronological order. As previously noted, all the male characters are pretty much the same; outwardly successful and stunningly good-looking but not very self-confident. Also, Ali Hazelwood does tend to write her female characters just a bit too out there. Someone else commented that they have to use big words to show how clever they are, and I get that. I am also shocked that at least one of them isn't a vegan (and that probably tells you a lot abut the way they are written).
I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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