Thank you Net Galley and St Martins’ press for this arc.

While I really like the premise of this book, I don’t think it delivered on what the blurb said it would be. I expected something different than I got. Also the hero nine was hard to root for. Also felt the writing was a little all over the place. A lot of side plots and some of it had nothing to do with the main couple. Also plot holes felt added in just to add in. Not sure what the purpose for some of these things where like the London guy or Kian’s family plot. Also found my self wanting more of the side characters stories instead of Kian and Lyric. I like the author’s past work so I am willing to try her again. This one wasn’t for me.

3.5/5

This being marketed as The Kiss Quotient meets Love Potion No. 9 and I have to say, that’s a pretty dang accurate mash up in terms of describing this book. The author used a couple of different tropes in her last book and she does it again here too, and does it pretty well might I add. You have friends to lovers with a side of fake dating and fake dating is one of my faves so I was happy to see it here. Despite Lyric being a woman in STEM, which I love and always find interesting, she isn’t portrayed as the best scientist around. She’s talked about as being super smart but her actions (both romantically and having to do with her research) don’t really match up to what was being said about who she is. It didn’t bother me too much, just something I found odd and wanted to mention. My overall experience here was good, I have to give credit to the audio narrators performances because I truly enjoyed listening to both Brittany Pressley and Abhay Ahulwalia and felt like they elevated things for me.

This book has a ton of my favorite elements: best friends to lovers, academic setting, and a decent amount of 🌶️spice🌶️. It was light-hearted and reminded me a lot of Christina Lauren's Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating. Lyric and Kian are both working toward their PhDs when they agree to go on fake dates and we can all guess what happens from there. While I loved the premise of Lily trying to crack her Sizzle Paradox, I struggled a bit to get through this because there really isn't much happening for over half the book. It got pretty frustrating to read pages upon pages of our main characters being so adamantly against even *considering* a relationship with the other when everyone else can see right through it. Once the ball got rolling though, it wrapped up to be a really heartwarming romance.

Pretty cute! It took me a little bit to get into it, but I think I’ve just been in a funk lately. Over all, I enjoyed it!

This book left me really, really confused. It tread a weird line, in my opinion, between light and fluffy and trying to reach for more but really never getting there and thus missing out on being just a really great light and fluffy read. It had the friends to lovers trope that I love meeting up with a twist on the fake dating trope that I typically go for as well. For me, it just so clearly missed the mark. I'm giving it to a 3.25 though as it wasn't terrible, it just wasn't what I wanted it to be!

This is a pretty standard best friends-to-lovers novel.

Lyric is a grad student researching attraction and romance, but she’s blocked. She hasn’t felt a spark in a while. Kian, her best friend/roommate offers to coach her in what a good date is (because, ladies, he is GOOD). Shenanigans ensue.

This is a really quick, fast paced book. A great summer read. Skip it if you’re not into the whole, both in love with each other but assuming the other person is repulsed by the idea of a relationship. This book relies HEAVILY on that. Kian and Lyric have a great friendship, though. And the spice is pretty decent.

This slow burn friends to lovers story will keep you up all night!

Lyric and Kian have been best friends since their freshman year. They've been there for each other through every drunken toilet embrace, every heartfelt confession of dates gone wrong, and every late night of studying that didn't pay off. They're roommates who are comfortable with each other, who tell each other everything.

Lyric's doctoral thesis in social psychology is based on her hypothesis that when two people are intellectually and sexually compatible, pheromones come into play and there's a far greater chance that they are each other's OTP. She calls this phenomenon the Sizzle Paradox. She's determined to prove it based on her own experiences, but always ends up disappointed.

Kian is a serial dater. He's never with anyone for very long, and he always moves onto the next person with no remorse or regret. But he never has trouble attracting what Lyric thinks are potential life partners. So Lyric decides she needs his help.

Kian and Lyric agree to go on a couple of fake dates. The fake dates lead Lyric to the realization that she's been hiding her attraction to her best friend. She's determined to ignore it. Until a kiss neither of them planned ruins everything.

This is a slow-burn, steamy, friends to lovers, fake dating story that fans of The Cheat Sheet and People You Meet on Vacation will thoroughly enjoy.

Such a fun book! What if your best-friend was possibly “the one” to help you answer the sizzle paradox, also known as that special combination of emotional matching, sexual chemistry, and physical connection? As two doctoral students, Kian and Lyric have known each other and been best friends since freshman year of college; they’ve seen each other at their worst and just fit each other like a pair of comfy worn-in shoes.

Lyric has been stumped with her research for the “sizzle paradox” and agrees to accept Kian’s help discovering what makes a good match (for her) by going on a series of fake dates. From here, it’s only a matter of time until Kian and Lyric discover they might have the potential to become more than friends. I loved the pacing of this book and the dynamic between the comfortable “friend zone” daily life combined with the tense heated “dating” moments. Kian and Lyric complement each other so well that it’s easy to see how they might be able to successfully move their relationship from best friends to romantic partners. The best parts of the book were the intense quiet moments when each character is attempting to have restraint but then also completely ready to become reckless. Some family and friend dynamics I would’ve liked to see explored more, but the complexity of side characters seemed to stay at a minimum. Also I’m not sure as to how believable the research side of this story was, but I didn’t have too much trouble suspending reality if only for the storyline’s sake. I hope Lily Menon continues to write more adult contemporary romances in the future as I believe she will garner a strong following. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for this eARC in exchange for my honest evaluation. All opinions are my own.
3.75 ⭐️ rounded up to 4 ⭐️

This book was everything I wanted out of a fun romantic comedy! The main characters were great, it's definitely something I would recommend as a light summery read. Lily Menon is such a great author and I can't wait to see what she does next!

I normally enjoy her books, but I just couldn’t get into this one; no sizzle and a very annoying protagonist who never got better. Unfortunately, this was not my cup of tea and while I almost DNF so many times, I slogged through it to the end in hopes of a payoff. There was none.

The premise of the book had me excited. I love a best friends/roommates-to-fake dating-to-lovers rom-com. It's quite a slow burn and there is a lot of miscommunication between the two main characters about their feelings for one another that kind of fell flat to me. It was a quick read and the romance was cute overall.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me this ARC, but this does not influence my review. This was a great read, it features the best friends to lovers trope. The book was well written, I was obsessed with the jealousy and mutual pining. What I didn't like was the multi POV of both FMC and Kian.

To be completely honest, I struggled to finish this book. I thought the premise seemed very intriguing, but the actual book was just not for me. I found most of the characters annoying. I think this is because I never felt like we got to explore a deeper level. Everything felt like very surface level. If we got to know more about them, maybe I would have had easier time connecting. Because it was compared to The Kiss Quotient in the blurb, I had very high expectations, but I found the plot to be lacking. everything seemed to be moving so slowly. Overall, it was underwhelming. I cannot honestly say that I would recommend this in the future.

I really enjoyed the writing style of The Sizzle Paradox! Conversation flowed well and the characters were charming. Would definitely read more from Lily Menon!

Thank you to St. Martin's Press for the review copy of this book!

Note: in the author's note at the end of this book, I learned that Lily Menon also writes under the name Sandhya Menon, who you may be familiar with from her popular YA novels such as When Dimple Met Rishi. If you liked those books, you may be interested in seeing how Menon's writing translates to the adult romance realm!

Since I've been devouring cartoon cover romances this year, especially those set in academia (since I spent a lot of time in PhD school and all), wanted to pick this up for the fun academic-y premise. This was exactly what I was expecting based on the book summary: a friends-to-lovers romance set in academia with spicy content. The story is about Lyric, a psychology PhD student studying the relationship between sexual and emotional attraction in partners. Lyric herself has never been able to find a partner that she feels both with, so her roommate and bestie, Kian, offers to help tutor her in dating so she can become less awkward and maybe, just maybe, figure out the secret to this chemistry so she can put the final, personal touches on her thesis project.

Let's just cut to the chase: I gave this book three stars, which means I would recommend it to some people but it was very average in terms of my personal reading experience. On one level, I am ALWAYS here for the warm fuzzies of a romance exploding in the second half of a spicy book. This book had the build up, the chemistry, kissing, and all the fun bits that just helped me escape the real world for a bit to get caught up in the intensity of these characters falling in love.

However, two main issues kept this book from being spectacular for me.

First, as a (former) academic, some of the academic-y stuff felt a bit off to me. A small example would be when Kian defended his dissertation and then walked across the stage to graduate the next week. I don't know about other academics, but I had to defend several weeks before graduation so that I had time to complete any edits and formatting before final submission of all of my documents to the graduate school!

There were other nitpicky details like that that I could forgive, overall, but it was Lyrics journey with her Sizzle Paradox research that took me out of the story. The overall concept of it felt forced, especially Lyric's insistence that she had to personally feel/experience the Sizzle Paradox herself in order to make her research stronger. I'm sorry, but that just felt unnecessary and unrealistic for a PhD student whose project is "basically funding the whole lab." She clearly had all of her data and could have published her paper and graduated, but she couldn't because she needed to feel a tingle-in-her-down-there? That doesn't quite jive with the type of rigorous, scientific, quantitative psychological research she was portrayed as working on.

Second, the love story here felt forced for the plot. Lyric and Kian are besties who claim they would be a "disaster" romantically -- fine. But then they concoct a really strange fake-dating plot where Kian "tutors" Lyric to be less awkward so she can better find her sizzle paradox, and Lyric is to help give Kian advice to better his dating life as well. This would all be fine, except they don't ever do much actual tutoring or advice giving on these "dates." Despite that, they keep going on them and even escalate to a very random "Weekend Getaway" fake date. Could they not just go to the destination wedding as friends? Why did it have to involve tutoring...that never even actually happened on the date? It was all a little strange.

The final kicker was a fake date at the treehouse restaurant where Kian and Lyric somehow end up ignoring their dinners and getting naked at the table, then going outside to have sex in the grass. I was a bit confused about where all of the people working there would have been during this encounter and how Kian and Lyric managed this feat! But I guess that's the kind of belief you suspend in the name of romance?

Throw in some heavy miscommunication/lack of clear communication to complicate matters at the end and I was definitely a little "meh" by the time the story was over. The romance reader in me was happy for the Happily Ever After, but the skeptical, critical, curmudgeonly old lady in me was not overly impressed with how the pieces of this were forced together to make the plot work.

Overall, I would recommend this book to folks who love to read romance without thinking too much about the details. I know those folks are out there, and there are probably more of those folks than there are folks like me!

Thank you for an advanced copy of this book!

Star Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Pub Date: June 28, 2022

I was super excited for this book, and there were many elements of it I enjoyed. First, I love anytime graduate students are given representation. It is so hard being a grad student and both rewarding and frustrating, and I think it helps when you see yourself in a story. Second, I also love a good friends to lovers story. Third, I thought the topic was super interesting. You don't read about a lot of experts in sexual chemistry, and Lyric was definitely an expert in theory, if not practice. These three elements made the book pretty interesting.

Unfortunately, the characters fell really flat for me. Lyric was just boring and Kian just didn't do it for me either. I wasn't invested at all in their love story, and I didn't really care if they ended together or not...which is not a good sign for a romance book!

While I found this one full of potential, it ended up falling flat for me. I was really torn between a two and a three star rating for it, but I ultimately went with three because of the positives I listed on the front end of the review.

The Sizzle Paradox is a cute read but in all honesty, it fell a little short of sizzling for me. Lyric is writing up her thesis on what she is calling the Sizzle Paradox - a combination of things that when put together with a scan of the brain can affirm or deny if what a couple has is truly a life long true love situation.

Lyric lives with her best friend Kian. From the get go, the reader can feel that these two main characters are emotionally committed to each other stunting any other romantic relationships that they have. However, they can't see it. Kian commits to tutoring Lyric in how to date and voila! a series of dates leads to the discovery of the feelings they were afraid to admit to themselves.

The non-communication trope in books drives me absolutely bonkers and this book was filled with it. I'm guessing that's why I found myself not connecting as well with this story as I wanted to. I did however enjoy the adorable moments between Lyric and Kian.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this Advanced Reader Copy for my honest review. This book has a publish date of June 28th so if you enjoy a fake-dating romance with women in STEM and a happy ending, pre-order today!

Lyric and Kian are best friends and have been roommates for years. They've always told everyone they're great friends, but would be a disaster of a relationship. When Lyric's research on sexual attraction has stalled due to her own lack of chemistry with various dates, Kian offers to take her on fake dates to help her figure out what's going wrong. Of course, they begin to see each other in a new light.

For a graduate student studying relationships and sexual attraction, Lyric was painfully naive about relationships, and I got strong Emma vibes from how cluelessly Lyric kept trying to pair up Kian and her friend Zoey when it was very, very obvious that neither of them was interested in the other.

This was a super cute and easy read that will be perfect for this upcoming summertime season. It has women-in-stem representation, faking dating, friends-to-lovers (who are also roommates), and decent spice! The only negatives is that the plot is a little predictable and the MC Lyric comes off a lil too quirky at times. But overall an enjoyable read.

I give it 4/5 overall and 2/5 on a spice scale.

Thank you St. Martins Press and NetGalley for this arc in exchange for my honest review!

thank you smp for this e-arc!

i adore lily/sandya’s ya novels, and the fact that she’s writing adult novels now?? sign me up!!

the sizzle paradox has both friends to lovers AND fake dating!! my two favorite tropes!! i liked how this book had a different take on fake dating.

the sexual tension was intense; kian and lyric were truly something

the friendships >>