Who doesn’t dream of meeting their soulmate for a lifetime together? What if you could predict with a high degree of certainty who that would be before you even go on your first date? This would eliminate the hope and despair cycle with every date you go on; a cycle that grows more desperate as you age. In The Soulmate Equation, Christina Lauren, writing duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, have come up with just such technology that takes the guessing out of the equation.

This is a thoroughly entertaining book that I couldn’t stop reading once I started. If unputdownability is a marker of success, then I would say that this book was highly successful in capturing my interest.

An Aside: The authors have done a wonderful job with Jess’ closest friend, Fizzy. She gets just enough page time to be memorable. Her character is like her nickname and she adds pep, humor, support, and a reality-check to Jess’ life. She is the perfect friend to have in your corner, and I really hope she gets a book of her own.

Full Review: https://frolic.media/book-of-the-week-the-soulmate-equation-by-christina-lauren/

4 1/2 stars! CL delivered another flirty, fun, and sweet romcom. I laughed and blushed and didn’t want to put it down. Loved it!

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Thank you NetGalley for the darling read!

If you have entirely given up on the dating scene, and are tired of the bar scene, and don’t know what to do, well, the premise here is that they can genetically find you the perfect match. What a great concept, and we are here to see it put into action.
The author gives us a young single mother, she has been blessed that her grandparents are there for her, and really isn’t interested in dating. Enter her friend Fizzy, a friend that is really there for her, no matter what, and has taken the test and wants Jess to.
Funny how some people are right in front of you all the time, but you don’t really see them, but take a test and wow!
I found the subject matter very interesting, and we read how it plays out!
Tired of traditional ways of dating? You might want to try GenticAlly!
I received this book through Net Galley and the Publisher Gallery Books, and was not required to give a positive review.

GUYSSSSSS!!! This was classic CLo wit, banter, and chemistry for me!! I loved it so much. AND!! It’s been so long since I claimed a new book boyfriend, well I found one in River 😍😍😍

Sometimes you find a character that you just instantly identify with... and that’s how I felt about Jess in this book. Her single mom guilt just hit so hard for me. The feeling of juggling all of the things and you cannot handle one more ball thrown in without a collapse. The struggle was real. AND THEN!!! I really appreciated how River knew what she needed. Their chemistry was JUST SO GOOD!! Sweet, kind and altogether lovely!! I cried at weird times and then had an unexpected bawling attack halfway through the book (like had to take a break because I couldn’t see)😭😭😭

Also, EVERY SINGLE SIDE CHARACTER was AMAZING - cute grandparents, cute kid, great BFF - they added so much to this book!! Go get this book ASAP!!

oh CLo, I have missed you. I have been a fan since the early days of the Beautiful series and have faithfully followed you everywhere you've gone. This book feels more like the CLo of the earlier years and I am here for it. Thank you so much for letting me read this totally unique spin on fake dating. It took a bit to catch up with the science, but the love story still has my heart. For early CLo readers, for fans of page turning emotional but fun romance, read this book.

For the love of everything squee!

This book was just lovely. Rich, and warm, and smart, and sensual – it ticked every box and captured my heart in the most satisfying way.

The story gets off to a bit of a slow start, but stick with it because it picks up quickly. And, honestly, even the slow parts were laced with this snappy humor that felt like it dialed right into my sense of humor. I laughed - out loud - more than once. But for me, the real magic of the book began once River and Jess started exploring their relationship. Good gravy, the emotional depth of this book drew me deeper and deeper, flayed my heart wide open, and kept me reading compulsively, desperate to know how everything played out.

These two were so perfect. I mean, River is a dreamboat – smart in both an intellectual and emotional way. Sexy. Playful and earnest and respectful. All the things! He was all the things and I’m so in love with him!

But also, Jess. Who is all of the things River is, basically. But also somehow more. I loved her big brave heart and her relentless devotion to the people she loved. I loved how her fears didn’t dictate her choices. I loved how strong her voice was when she chose to use it. I absolutely adored her and the sweet, heartfelt relationship she formed with River.

And it’s not just River and Jess making all the magic here. There is this delightful cast of side-characters that added depth and lightness and fun to the storyline. I loved everyone so much.

GAH! This was just a practically perfect reading experience. A solid, captivating, perfectly lovely romance. An easy Christina Lauren favorite for sure! ~ 4.5 Stars

What an amazing book, I just absolutely loved the whole thing. River was just so sweet, caring, loving, and a little nerdy. Jess knew her own mind, was loving, caring and just so full of laughable moments. I even enjoyed all the scientific talk, it was intriguing. This duo always delivers ands this one is no exception. I loved it.

This book was not what I thought it was going to be and in the end was so much more than I could have hoped. I love every book these ladies write and this one was not different.

Jess and River were fantastic and the premise of this book was so new and fun that I was really into it. The math and stuff was a little out of my head but the rest of it I hooked onto and was along for the ride. I loved that it was a unique story that was just about finding love.

Sometimes you need that and not all the crazy. This was a love that you can feel between he characters and age after page you fall in love with them. It was a ride that had me crossing my fingers till the end I was loved it.

Christina Lauren is back and heating up your summer reading with The Soulmate Equation. Grab your SPF, sunnies, big floppy hat, and settle in your lounge chair, because it’s H-O-T hot and you’re not going anywhere once you dive in!
Jess Davis has been rocking the single mom life with help from her grandparents and bestie. Raising her daughter Juno is her first priority. Who has time and energy to date, they’re all unmitigated disasters in Jess’s opinion. In a very low moment she agrees to a new unconventional dating approach, DNA based matching by a startup company, Gentic-Ally. Setting her possible matches unbelievably high she forgets the entire thing until she gets a match on her app followed by an unexpected phone call and a meeting. Scoring the highest ever match Jess is shocked to find she’s matched with the companies founder.
Dr River Pene is an abrasive, self absorbed, incredibly sexy man who frequents the same coffee shop as Jess, and she’s not interested 98% match or not! Compelled by the company just weeks before going public River and Jess agree to get to know each other. How does destiny, free will, results of efforts based on preconceived ideals play into the ultimate success in a relationship? It’s a timely and interesting concept that gets explored well without overwhelming the fun, steamy, romantic nature of the book. The balance is spot on in this readers opinion.
The Soulmate Equation is easily Christina Lauren’s best book since Love and Other Words, my personal favorite (until now!). Smart, sassy, sexy, sharp witted, with a lot of soul. This is the writing duo at the top of their game. I give it my highest recommendation, 5 sunny summer ⭐️’s!
Many thanks to Netgalley and Gallery Books for the advanced reader copy and the opportunity to review The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren. All opinions are my own.

Jess Davis decides to give her DNA for a date… sounds strange right? WRONG!!! This storyline was brilliant. Jess is a single mother to an adorable little girl and dating isn’t her number one priority. When a new way to date is at the cutting edge of pure genus. Jess hears about GeneticAlly, a new DNA-based matchmaking company. She decides to go for it. Little did she know who she would match with and not just match with a small percentage we are talking an unbelieve percentage.

First off, bravo to Christina Lauren for this work of art, and I do mean art. The research that must have went into writing this book had to be hard. The characters were talking things that I was like, “what is that?”

This story was so different and refreshing and just such a pleasant read from top to bottom. I loved every single character, well except for one or two, but all the main characters and what you would consider side characters a lot. River was quite the jerk at first or maybe a little too stuck in his head to notice the people around him. Side note, I hope Fizzy gets her own book. Fingers crossed.

At the end I was extremely satisfied and so happy I read this amazing story. I could not recommend this book enough.

ARC kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this so much! I know I'm late to the party since I'm only on my second Christina Lauren book, but she's quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

River, Jess, Juno, and Fizzy were everything! I really enjoyed all of the characters because they felt fully developed. The romance was swoon-worthy and I often times found myself smiling while reading.

Apart from that last little bit of information the author purposely excluded, this book was perfect! I 100% recommend!

Huge thank you to Netgalley and Gallery Books for the free Arc of this book in exchange for an honest review!

I loved The Soulmate Equation! Once the story picked up, I had an extremely hard time putting the book down. I rarely find myself unable to stop thinking about a book during my busiest days, but that was my experience here!

I loved Jess’s character - she’s hilarious. River got better the more we get to know him too. The banter is great. Many scenes build lots of sexual tension (but I would rate it a 4/10 🍆 because it’s not super open door and really is more lustful than steamy).

The pacing felt great to me and I was hooked 25% in. This has a mix of enemies to lovers and fake dating, and I’m here for it. The scene setting was also rich - one restaurant is so vivid it instantly reminded me of a bar I went to one time 7 years ago in San Francisco.

What wasn’t my favorite: Sometimes all the science and data references got to be a bit much to the point of distraction. And I felt like the heavier topics, including Jess’s relationship with her mom, were underdeveloped and more of an afterthought.

Overall, this was a great romance read that I would recommend to romance readers. It comes out May 18!

TW: Addiction and absent parent

Brace yourself for the geeky romance of the year. The soulmate equation made me laugh out loud, swoon at times and untilmately believe that love will stand the test of anything that come in-between. River and Jess are thrown into this forced relationship when their DNA compatibility matches to a mind blowing score of 98% which in GeneticAlly(DNA based match making company) terms means its a Diamond Match and also something that has never happened in the history of their company. So Is someone who is destined to be soulmates based on the calculations from every cell in their bodies just hit it off like they were meant to ? Only not because they practically couldn't care any less about each other. But this 98% match revelation makes them give this soulmate thing a try and things only get better from there. I loved their banter, their tension around each other, the way they cared for the family, and I could go on. River is definitely a potential book boyfriend. There was not many dull moments with this one. It was a breeze to read most of the times. I only found the last part of the book a little forced but life definitely is that way you could never enjoy your happy endings without a slight hiccup in the way, SO it was all good. Pick this one like immediately and enjoy the fuzzy cozy romance.

When I first found out that @christinalauren had a new book coming out, I knew I needed to get my hands on it. And it did not disappoint! Christina Lauren always does such an amazing job at building likable, realistic characters that it makes it so easy to fall in love with them and their characters. Jess was realistic and pragmatic, Fizzy was the perfect quirky and supportive best friend who had me laughing in every part she was in, and River absolutely stole my heart. Although this book did follow the pretty straight forward formula that I’ve come to realize a lot of these popular romcom books have, it didn’t bother me that much! I still loved the story and the characters so much that it was just such a fun read.

It was interesting reading another book based around a DNA-matching dating app. I read The One by John Marrs earlier this year and it was super fun to see how a romance author and a thriller author tackled such a unique concept!

If you’re a big fan of Christina Lauren like I am, I highly recommend this one! For me, it wasn’t as cheesy as In a Holidaze, but wasn’t as emotional as Love and Other Words, but was still a really great, easy read.

Oh. My. Goodness. Christina Lauren does it YET AGAIN, supplying us with the swoonworthy romance of our dreams. I first fell in love with the Unhoneymooners, which found its way into my heart and into the hands of all of my friends. While I wasn't as impressed with In a Holidaze, I feel that the Soulmate Equation does everything one expects of a Christina Lauren novel while simultaneously breaking the meta of the writing process.

Jess believes in the solidarity of numbers, as numbers cannot lie. There's an exact way to interpret stats and data and it's what keeps her life stable, raising her seven year old daughter and supporting her grandparents. Without her best friend Felicity, or Fizzy, she knows she'd fall apart. She lives for the time each morning she gets to spend in the coffee shop with Fizzy while Fizzy works on her popular novels and Jess works on contracts for clients. And she definitely enjoys seeing the serious heartthrob that walks in every morning at 8:24 AM to order an Americano. In the spur of a moment, Fizzy gets him to stop, having heard he's some fancy love bigshot, only to find out that River Peña is the head honcho and founder of GeneticAlly, a company that analyzes your spit to find your genetic match, looking at your DNA and seeing just how similar certain genes are to others in the system. When Jess resorts to taking the test, she finds the results nearly impossible: she matched with River himself...at the highest tier. She's torn between denying the stats or believing in them, knowing it could change her life forever.

Between the instantly loveable characters, the highly believeable plot, the swoonworthy romance, the endearing moments, and everything else in between, The Soulmate Equation is a bingeable and raunchy read, pulling you in and refusing to let go until you've finished reading it within a few hours. Perfect as a summer beach read, Christina Lauren's novel is one of my highlights so far this year and, just like with the Unhoneymooners, is being shoved into the hands of everyone I know. One of my favorite aspects is Fizzy, Jess's best friend who is also a novelist. Having Fizzy document everything that happens between Jess and River, saving it as fuel for future novels, feels like the perfect representation of the writing process I assume Christina Lauren goes through. Haven't we all felt that the things our friends and family experience would be great if fictionalized?

I'm dying to get my hands on more Christina Lauren and just know this is my favorite one yet, being so endearing and passionate, but also so enjoyable you just want to devour it in one setting.

OMG I loved this book. I think Christina Lauren are at their best when the romances are comical. And this one is so very much like The Unhoneymooners. So if you liked that one, you should definitely give this one a try.

There's a fake dating trope, a single mom, and lots of humor. What more can you ask for? Jess is wonderfully nerdy and her daughter Juno is written like an actual 7 year old; Fizzy (the best friend) is awesome and deserves her own book; Nana Jo and Pops are just too cute for words! The only character I had a real problem with was River. He was unlikable for the first quarter of the book and then did an about face rather suddenly and then again towards the end. It makes it hard to believe that Jess would still fall for him in such a short period of time, but such is the way of romance books. It was still delightful even if I did have to mildly suspend my belief in the heroine to do it.

Christina Lauren does it again! I have yet to read a book by them that I didn't love. When single mom Jess and workaholic River end up being Diamond Matches in River's genetic based dating app, the rational brain in both of them to try to date for the sake of science, but can these oil and water relationship actually turn into something good? And when the numbers reveal something concerning can they still fall in love when the science is in question? Add in a cute 7 year old daughter, a quirky rom-com writer best friend and two loving grandparents and you get a perfect Christina Lauren novel!
I couldn't help but wonder (Insert Carrie Bradshaw Gif Here) Am I the only one that wondered if it was based on gene's wouldn't you match with family members? Anyways, I loved how nerdy it was. Honestly how do they know all this science stuff? It had me totally baffled, but I loved that they embraced the nerdery. I enjoyed how they started off as quasi "enemies" and ended up being the perfect match. It had the perfect amount of twists, nothing too saucy or graphic, and an overall excellent storyline!

I came across Christina Lauren in 2019 when they published The Unhoneymooners and Instagram blew up over it. Since then I have been slowly working through their backdated books and have yet to find one I didn't love, until The Soulmate Equation.

First I will start by saying that everything you think will happen in this book based on the blurb does, and legit nothing else. The first half is very slow, and if I'm brutally honest, kind of boring. Lots of it is just Jess and her BFF sitting in a coffee shop. The second half however really took off for me and I read from chapter 20 to finish in one sitting. If you like romances where everything always ends up perfect because magically every "bad" situation is best case scenario, then you'll like this. If you want more substance, prob avoid.

I wanted to also note that I loved that the main character was a single mom. As a single mom at one point myself, I could relate in some ways and appreciated the spotlight on that.

Overall this is likely my least favorite Christina Lauren book that I have read thus far, and I'm bummed that it wasn't better.

Solid 3.5 , but likely wouldn't recommend

This was such a cute, fun, nerdy read! I loved Jess - a smart, sassy, hard-working single mom who is methodical in every aspect of her life. Juno, her daughter, is a delight and Her best friend Fizzy is HILARIOUS. Fizzy is the hype girl every woman needs.

The premise is a step beyond online dating - matchmaking based on DNA similarities. Think 23andme meets eHarmony. Except Jess gets matched with the surly, cantankerous scientist who shows up at her favorite coffee shop every morning. A super nerdy enemies to lovers relationship begins and takes you on a sweet ride. There is a lot of science in this book, which was hilarious and awesome to this Biology Ph.D.

As always, Christina Lauren gave us a great romance. Light on the steam, heavy on the yearning. 😉

4/5 stars

I flew through this book in one day and really liked it! It grabbed my attention from the beginning and left me wanting to know how the ending would turn out. This enemies to lovers, single mom and fake relationship book was so easy to follow and had many twists and turns too.

This book reminded me of R.S. Grey books but with less steam. The last few books I've read by Christina Lauren weren't my favorite so I'm glad this one could redeem their writing style for me.

Jess is a fantastic main character and her friendship with Fizzy, her daughter and her grandparents, made me smile and so happy for the joys in her life. River is mysterious, loyal and so supportive and I'm glad his walls were broken down throughout the book.

The concept of this book, DNA testing to find out someone's compatibility to one another is very creative and intriguing to read about!

If you enjoy these troupes, you'd enjoy this book!!