SUMMARY
A forbidden, secret affair proves that all’s fair in love and science—from New York Timesbestselling author Ali Hazelwood.
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.
Image and summary from Goodreads.
REVIEW
I’ve read quite a few of Ali Hazelwood’s books over the past year and she’s become one of those authors whose new releases I’ll happily pick up without needing to know much about the plot. So I went into Not in Love with pretty high expectations.
Unfortunately, this ended up being my least favourite Ali Hazelwood book so far.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. Ali Hazelwood still has such an easy writing style that makes her books incredibly quick to get through and I found myself flying through this one over a couple of days. She has a way of writing dialogue that feels natural and I always enjoy the humour she brings to her characters.
Where this one fell a little flat for me was the romance itself.
Throughout the book, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Eli was almost obsessed with Rue from the very beginning. Rather than slowly getting to know her as a person, it often felt like his attraction was driven much more by the physical side of their relationship than by an emotional connection. Because of that, I found it harder to become invested in them as a couple.
I love romances where you can really see two people fall in love through conversations, shared experiences and little moments that slowly build into something bigger. Here, I personally felt like the emotional side of the relationship was overshadowed by the physical attraction. By the time deeper feelings started to develop, it almost felt rushed because I didn’t think the emotional foundation had been built strongly enough.
That being said, I still enjoyed both Rue and Eli as individual characters. I liked Rue’s independence and how capable she was and I appreciated that both characters had their own vulnerabilities beneath the surface. There were definitely moments where I could see glimpses of the emotional connection I wanted more of. I just wish we’d spent a little longer exploring those moments instead of moving so quickly back to the physical side of their relationship.
I think part of the reason this book didn’t quite work for me is simply because I’ve loved Ali Hazelwood’s previous books so much. When you’ve already read books that completely win you over, it’s hard not to compare this book to my favourites by Ali Hazelwood. This one just didn’t give me the same butterflies or leave me thinking about the characters long after I’d finished.
Overall, Not in Love was still an enjoyable read and I don’t regret picking it up. It just wasn’t the Ali Hazelwood book I connected with the most. I wanted a little more emotional depth and a relationship that felt like it grew naturally rather than being built primarily on physical attraction.
This was a 3 star read for me. While it wasn’t my favourite Ali Hazelwood novel, I’ll absolutely keep reading whatever she writes next because I still love her writing style. Sometimes a book just doesn’t resonate in the same way as the others and that’s exactly how I felt with Not in Love.
-Rachelle
I’m on Instagram at @rachellesbookshelf
