Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟

By Ali Hazelwood

I know so many people give this book 5-stars, and I totally get it. I read it a few years ago and remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed. However, I thought I’d try again since I’ve recently seen some glowing reviews for it.

Olive, a Ph.D. candidate, doesn’t believe in love, but her best friend Anh does. To get Anh off her case, Olive spontaneously kisses and then enters a mutually beneficial fake-dating pact with Adam, a hot but grumpy young professor in her department. As they attempt to convince their friends and colleagues that the romance is real, it becomes challenging to differentiate fictional feelings from real ones. 

I suspect that I don’t love this book as much as some because of my years spent working in higher education and not being able to process anyone behaving this way in an academic setting. It just makes me cringe. I also would have loved to get more of a sense of Adam as a complete character – perhaps if it had been written as a dual POV instead of only getting his perspective toward the end and in a bonus chapter.

There are some very funny parts of the book, and I do genuinely enjoy how supportive Adam was after the events of the conference. A solid 3-stars from me. A good book, but it didn’t blow me away.