Riding off the high of Ali Hazelwood’s books The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain, and Love, Theoretically, I picked up Not in Love to see if it was up there with the rest of them. Safe to say it missed the mark for me. With a warning at the beginning to prove it wasn’t going to be like the other romances, I was already prepared for a different take on the women in STEM romance plot.

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.

Now here’s the thing: the plot doesn’t really do anything after the first few chapters – that blurb above gives the breakdown of the plot with the exception of the ending. Does this make it a bad book? No. But it does make it a little boring. With little action-driven movement, the reliance for forward progression is with the characters, and they are busy thinking about something else over the main plot. Perhaps that’s the easiest way to say it – the main plot is the secret romance between Rue and Eli. Again, that’s not a bad thing, but unlike Ali Hazelwood’s other books there is little supporting plot to move the story forward.

The warnings, for those who would like to know before they pick up Not in Love, is along the lines of “this is more of an erotica than the romances I have previously written”. Nothing wrong with that and I appreciate her mentioning it in the foreword. The other warning comes as a trigger warning for food scarcity and I believe there was a warning about poor eating habits. The warnings are once again appreciated, but in the larger scope of things I don’t think they were actually addressed. Food scarcity is a relevant plot point and there are several interesting and informative aspects of this topic which come through in Rue’s thinking and actions, but the poor eating habits is more of a contextual thing if I remember right. If it was a theme that was intended to be discussed, there isn’t much to say about it.

It is a shame that Not In Love missed the mark, but this is a reminder that not every book by an author is guaranteed to land. It brings an interesting phenomenon to mind that occurs in the bookish social media space and that is auto-buying an author’s book. I haven’t done it myself, though I have made the impulsive decision to buy a bunch of books I didn’t end up rereading or wanting on my shelves in a year’s time. So, for those of you who do auto-buy your favourite authors’ books, I have some questions for you. What do you do in this instant when you don’t like the book? Does it impact your decision to continue to auto-buy their books? How many books have you auto-bought and regretted?