Ali Hazelwood: Reinventing Romance With Her STEMinist Novels 

By: Abbie Overdorf 

“Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” - Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis. 

In September 2021, Ali Hazelwood entered the romance world with her novels about women in the STEM field, calling them STEMinist novels. Hazelwood made her debut with The Love Hypothesis, which became a New York Times Best Seller after it blew up on BookTok, a community on TikTok where people discuss their favorite books, series, and authors. 

Since then, Ali Hazelwood has released two STEM novels, Love On The Brain and Love, Theoretically, and compiled a collection of three STEM novellas that were combined to make the book Loathe To Love You. She has also made her Young Adult (YA) debut with Check & Mate, as well as branching out to the paranormal perspective of romance with her most recent novel, Bride. Ali Hazelwood is set to release Not In Love, her newest addition to her STEMinist series, on June 11, 2024. 

The characters Ali Hazelwood creates are ones that you can relate to, and that is why I love her books. She uses the tropes of enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, and, my personal favorite, grumpy-sunshine. Her stories have the right amount of plot, side-character action, tension, and feminism in them. 

Originally from Italy, Ali Hazelwood moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. Hazelwood previously researched brain stimulation and cognitive neuroscience and worked as a professor before shifting her focus to her writing career. 

Outside of Ali Hazelwood’s academic career, she wrote fanfiction on Archive Of Our Own (AO3). AO3 was a creative outlet for Hazelwood where she could write about werewolves, vampires, or her love for “Reylo,” a ship between Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars. Ali Hazelwood’s Star Wars fanfiction, Head Over Feet, eventually developed into The Love Hypothesis. 

The Love Hypothesis follows Olive Smith, a third-year PhD candidate, and Adam Carlsen, a young, known to be rude professor, who pretends to be in a relationship with Olive so she can convince her best friend that her dating life is going well. Not only do they have to convince Anh, her best friend, that they’re in love, but they also have to persuade everyone else at the university. No hypothesis in the world could predict that they would forget that their feelings are supposed to be fake. 

Ali Hazelwood captured the attention of BookTok with The Love Hypothesis. From the beginning, readers noticed the story was heavily inspired by the “Reylo” ship from Star Wars and had a fanfiction type of writing to it, which wasn’t popular with some readers. But what people did like was the aspect of having a female main character in a STEM environment and building a romance story around that. 

With that being said, The Love Hypothesis does hit on some important topics that could be triggers for some readers, like the death of a main character’s parent in the past and workplace sexual harassment. The novel also addresses people learning how to express their emotions and dealing with emotional growth. 

The Love Hypothesis was the first book I read by Ali Hazelwood, and it became one of my favorite books. I loved the fake dating and grumpy-sunshine trope as well as the tension between the two characters. Adam and Olive quickly became my favorite book couple in the world of romance. 

Following the success of The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood released her second STEM novel, Love On The Brain, on August 23, 2022. In Love On The Brain, the reader follows Bee Königswasser when she gets offered her dream job: the lead on a neuroengineering project for NASA. There, she’s partnered with Levi Ward. The catch? They’ve been archenemies since grad school when Levi made his feelings towards Bee very clear. 

Ali Hazelwood released her third STEMinist novel, Love, Theoretically, on June 13, 2023, making this, as BookTok and a lot of avid readers would say, her best book yet. Love, Theoretically puts the bookworms through a journey between Elsie Hannaway, a theoretical physicist, and Jack Smith, an experimental physicist. After being an adjunct professor during the day, Elsie makes up for her nonexistent paycheck by being a fake girlfriend to anyone who needs it. Elsie thinks it's going pretty well until her favorite client’s older brother, Jack Smith, turns out to be the same person who ruined her mentor’s career and compromised the reputation of theorists everywhere. The problem is Jack Smith stands between Elsie and her dream job at MIT, as everyone loves him in the physics department. 

Love, Theoretically is by far Ali Hazelwood’s best-written novel. If a bookworm wasn’t a fan of Ali Hazelwood before Love, Theoretically, they will be after. In my opinion, the chemistry, banter, and feud between Elsie and Jack was impeccable. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic had the right amount of tension for all fans of the trope, myself included. The plot about Elsie being a part-time fake girlfriend was very entertaining to read. While reading, I found myself learning new things through Elsie’s character, like what it’s like to have diabetes and be a physics professor. The novel also had a cameo of Adam and Olive from The Love Hypothesis, which I very much enjoyed. I am not a science person, but while reading Love, Theoretically, or any Ali Hazelwood book, I noticed I learned a lot of elements about the field, like the difference between experimental and theoretical. 

Whether it’s written like fanfiction or not, you can’t dismiss the fact that Ali Hazelwood turned the romance world upside down with her STEMinist novels, bringing women in STEM onto paper and giving real-life STEM women someone to relate to. Hazelwood portrays the misogynistic side of being a woman in STEM, that I think a lot of women in that field can relate to. There are not a lot of romance stories about this career field, but it’s important to have them. Her novels give women in STEM the opportunity to feel seen and heard, as Hazelwood knows exactly how it feels to be one. It’s important to write these independent female main characters who work in a field that is predominantly male in a romance novel. 

I believe that Ali Hazelwood’s writing can encourage young readers to pursue a career in STEM as well as believe that they can find love in the field. 

Ali Hazelwood made a slight shift from her fanfiction type of writing when constructing her third full-length novel. While it still includes elements of a fanfiction-inspired style, Love, Theoretically has gotten a lot of attention in the book community and brought in new fans. 

With five novels, one being a collection of novellas, under her belt, Ali Hazelwood continues to write and publish more. Her most recent one, Bride, is vastly different from her other novels. Bride took Hazelwood back to her fanfiction days, as it is a paranormal romance about werewolves and vampires, or as Ali Hazelwood spells it, Weres and Vampyres. 

Bride follows Misery Lark, the daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman, and Lowe Moreland, the Alpha of the Were community. Misery maintains the alliance between the Vampyres and Were by agreeing to a marriage of convenience to Lowe. Misery isn’t doing this for the politics or alliances but for the only person she cares about: her best friend. She is willing to do this, even if it means she has to live alone in Were territory. 

Ali Hazelwood’s fifth novel is all about the dynamic of how Vampyres, Weres, and Humans tolerate living in the same universe together. Bride has captivated a whole new community of people who either love paranormal romance, or are avid fanfiction readers obsessed with anything and everything to do with Vampires and Werewolves. As someone who has rarely read or watched anything with Vampires and Werewolves, I loved this book. Although the main plot is romance, the book also includes subplots about politics and the history of the societies as well as an element of mystery. Reading Bride made me want to watch Twilight, Teen Wolf, Vampire Diaries, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer all in one night.

Ali Hazelwood doesn’t stop there. She has a new STEMinist novel coming out on June 11, 2024, Not In Love, which is about a forbidden, secret affair between Rue Siebert, a biotech engineer at Kline, a start-up company in the field of food science, and Eli Killgore, as Eli and his business partners want to acquire Kline. Not much has been said about her new novel, but Ali Hazelwood enthusiasts are very excited about its announcement. 

Ali Hazelwood has come a long way from her fanfiction days to now publishing her own books. Despite the backlash Hazelwood has received from some readers, she continues to pursue her passion. A lot of readers put her in the category of a fanfiction writer since that’s where she started, but plenty of well-known authors have started their journey just like Hazelwood did. 

Fanfiction is an outlet for many authors starting their careers, as it’s a great way to write and share your ideas with readers of the same liking. Any author has to get their start somewhere, and I think if fanfiction is the way to go, they shouldn’t be put in a specific category just because they like to write about their favorite fictional characters from a TV show or movie. It’s about the art of writing, not from where it comes from. 

And just like Bee Königswasser in Love On The Brain, ask yourself,  “What would Marie Curie do?”