I DNF'd this book at the 32% mark. I was so excited for this book and had such high hopes. It was giving me The Love Hypothesis vibes, but I just couldn't get into the characters at all. I hated Tom so much, he was so intentionally mean and would try to justify it by saying it was because he didn't want his work relationship with Liz to be weird/against the rules. I really gave up when he "unintentionally" memorized her phone password and then proceeded to look on her phone. This was after he "drunkenly but not drunkenly" admitted to liking her, and then proceeded to STILL not talk about his emotions to her. I just couldn't get behind Tom's character, and while I loved that it made him more relatable and 'human' I couldn't stand behind the manipulation. I don't think I can even start on Liz's character. I can't believe, for four years, she let this grown man be so incredibly rude to her. Especially with how much she stands up to him (in the 32% that I read), you'd think she'd put her foot down. And then she would open up to him, to only turn around and be like "no everything I'm doing is to get back at how rude he's been" and then she was mad when he would also close up. I always appreciate a book that shows humans being humans, which I loved that these characters were. But I just stayed frustrated and couldn't enjoy the book without being angry at the characters. Which in the end made it hard to really get into the book. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book for my honest review! This was such a cute little rom com perfect for anyone looking for a feel good love story! If you loved ‘The Love Hypothesis’, I truly think you will fall in love with these characters and this story! I will definitely be recommending this book to anyone I know who loved the love hypothesis!

I thought I was going to really enjoy this book because it was presented as something similar to The Love Hypothesis, a book that I really liked but... nope.
This book made me uncomfortable at times and I don't like that in my romance books. That and the fact that our main characters were very immature (and since when violating someone's privacy is cute?)... made me not want to root for them as a couple.
And I have to admit I was liking our MCs interactions up until the "parents twist", after that everything felt weird and in the end, affected my overall enjoyment of the story.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Overview | A heartfelt, witty romance with two charming characters who don’t say what they mean, or mean what they say.
8.5/10 ⭐️
Genre | Contemporary Romance/Women's Fiction
Tropes | Enemies-to-Lovers, Age Gap, Shared Pasts, Forced Proximity, Workplace Romance, STEM
POV | First Person/Present Tense, dual narrators
Heat Level | 🌶🌶, open door, on-page
TW | parental loss, off-page, backstory only
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There is so much to like and recommend in The Unbalanced Equation.

Summary: Dr. Elizabeth “Liz” Maclean thinks she’s free from her professional nemesis, Dr. Thomas “Tom” Henderson, as she begins her postdoc job at the University of Glasgow. Fate has another plan, as the two are throw together in both their personal and professional lives. Can these stubborn and smart academics with a complicated personal history find balance in their equation?

In mainstream romcoms we rarely see anything but the nuclear family dynamic as a marker of relationship success. Early on, we know that Liz and Tom’s vision of happily ever after is a childfree-by-choice partnership. Personally, being able to see myself and my own relationship in these characters was such a breath of fresh air. At the same time, the negative reactions Liz experienced as a woman for not wanting that suburban marriage with children felt very true-to-life.

This feels especially interesting in a book that is, at its heart, about family. Liz, Tom, and their parents are going through loss and finding their way through to a new, not better, way of being in a family. The kindness these characters show to each other around this new dynamic, even when those discussions are emotionally painful, is quite beautiful.

In any enemies-to-lovers story, somebody has to not be on their best behavior. Liz and Tom are no exception. Much like in another favorite, The Hating Game, these two are not saying what they mean, or meaning what they say. Unlike that book, we are privy to the inner thoughts of both characters, and get to see what makes them act like big ol’ dummies when confronted with the love of their life.

We don’t have to like the games they play here to see why they played them. There are moments where I wanted to throttle both Liz and Tom and tell them to just spit it out. But then I’m reminded that for people in their place in life, fear is always a part of the equation. Be that fear of rejection, or abandonment, or even looking foolish people clam up when they need to be open.

The relationship in the end felt hard-won and they had such great chemistry we don’t worry about what happens after the epilogue.

Bonus points for the setting. I haven’t read a non-historical set in Scotland perhaps...ever? Now I would like more. Very excited to see this author is writing another one in the series next about the mysterious Simon. I’ll smash that buy button!

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Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Right from the very first page I enjoyed this book and easily became interested in the storyline. Liz and Tom both work as researchers at a University and absolutely hate each other. After many terrible and coincidental events they are forced to share the same work bench and live together. Forced proximity is one of my favourite tropes and always leads to so much angst and tension between the two main characters. I absolutely loved the connection between Liz and Tom, they always have such a fun, playful relationship that’s so enjoyable to read. I also enjoyed the dual pov and being able to see both MC’s thoughts. Tom makes some dumb decisions in the book but I was glad to see his growth and how he learnt from his mistakes. The thing that was missing for me was I wasn’t obsessed with the MC’s. I definitely enjoyed them but I didn’t fall in love with them. However, I did fall in love with their relationship and how much happiness this book brought me which is why I think that this is a great book!

This was a quick, fun read. It reminded me a little of The Love Hypothesis because of the setting, but it was missing the charm/banter. I got annoyed by the MC quite frequently and this went on for about 100 pages longer than it needed to. Still, a good romance (I’m not a big fan of enemies-to-lovers), but I would read this author again.


Thanks to #Netgalley and the publishers for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3/5
Spice: 2.5/5
Storyline: 3/5
Tropes: enemies to lovers, age gap, forced proximity, second chances
Content Warnings: death of a parent, toxic relationship

The Unbalanced Equation is set in Glasgow, but the author doesn’t do much more than name drop the location, so it’s easy to forget. The protagonist, Elizabeth Maclean, who goes by Liz, first meets Dr. Thomas Henderson, or Tom, at their labs mixer. They both have an instant attraction, but it is immediately detailed when they are paired together as student and assessor. Tom decides the only way to resist his attraction is to become a tyrant and make Liz’s experience as his student unbearable. Thus begins Liz's hate for Tom. The story jumps forward four years and they are brought back into each other’s lives after they learn their parents not only know each other, but they are now engaged; beginning Liz and Tom’s forced proximity journey, along with the help of Tom’s best friend Dai.

I was immediately drawn to The Unbalanced Equation hoping for a story similar to The Love Hypothesis and The Hating Game, but I think I set my standards too high. The story was fun, and I love that STEM characters are making a wave in romance novels, but these two characters kept making me mad because of their immature behavior. I think this book would have made more sense if the characters were much younger. They acted very immature for their age. Tom did some toxic things to Liz that I find difficult to justify and forget, and Liz toyed with Tom in ways that made me think she was in high school.

The secondary characters were enablers, in my opinion, and the only person who really seemed to care for Liz was her dad and Tom’s mom. Speaking of, I had a hard time getting away from the fact that Tom and Liz were technically siblings-in-law, and no one seemed to mention or take notice of that (except Tom and Liz). I know they aren’t related, but I feel like it should have been addressed, even if in a joking sense.

Overall, the book started out strong and I was excited to see how the two would reunite after four years. The story progressed and I was invested, hopeful the characters would get their act together and grow up, but the last third of the story kind of dragged for me.

Thank you to NetGalley, H. L. Macfarlane for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unforunately, this one wasn't for me. The story began slowly and I did not like the charecters. This is the first H.L. MacFarlane book I've read and will likely be the last.

This one was a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed some parts of it but there were elements that bothered me enough to cause me to drop it down several stars. The story follows PhD student Liz and Professor Tom who meet at a new student mixer and hit it off immediately, developing feelings for each other. They lose track of each other, and the next day Tom is assigned to be Liz's accessor. He deals with this conflict by deciding to be cruel to her to control his feelings. This is where it lost me. It would be one thing if he distanced himself and was a little rude, but he made a conscious decision to be cruel and harsh. The story then jumps to years later after Liz has finished her PhD and the two run are thrust together again in her post doc job. Tom, still enamored, oversteps several serious boundaries involving Liz's personal privacy to shepherd her toward him. We're supposed to be forgiving because he's just a silly man in love but it's so red flag heavy. It's a shame, because the story is fun, the chemistry is spicy, and the dialogue is enjoyable. The red flag storylines were unnecessary and really took me out of it. I'd only recommend this to an adult who knows what's what and can take this with a grain of salt, never to an impressionable young person.

Thanks to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a cute book! Liz was a fantastic character, and I absolutely adored her banter with Tom. Also, I'd very much like to smack Tom because he deserves to have some sense knocked into him. Not only with his decision to treat Liz badly, but how he tried to stop her from dating other people. That was not okay with me, and I didn't like that part.

Thank you to Netgalley and publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Publication: September 15, 2022

I'm noticing a trend where a lot of romance books seem to take place in the science field and I'm here for it. I always love broadening my horizons in the romance field. This book stood out to me because of the blurb and the cover is cute.

This is my second time reading a romance book featuring the "age gap" trope and unfortunately, I was not a fan of it within this book. Both main characters Liz and Tom are rivals because of how Tom treated her when he was her assessor. The writing is easy to read which I was thankful for but I just couldn't get past their behavior in this book.

I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if Tom and Liz acted more their age in their book and there weren't so many tropes happening at once (ie: age gap, forced proximity, enemies to lovers, parents getting married to each other, workplace romance, etc.)

When I started reading The Unbalanced Equation, it strongly reminded me of The Love Hypothesis, which I (among so many others) read and loved last year. I‘m so glad to see this trope (if women in STEM can be called a trope) popping up more and more. I think, aside from Ali Hazelwood‘s works, this is the second other such book I‘ve read, and though there are a lot of parallels, I enjoyed this one as well! I guess that’s just a certain feel-good element to it.

The book started off rather strongly with the two main characters Liz and Tom meeting at a social event, and the love interest then growing distant and downright hostile because Tom is assigned to be Liz‘s PhD assessor and he doesn‘t want to mix emotions into their academic relationship.

Tom behaves very extremely and though he realises that towards the end and apologises for it eventually, I feel like his actions were way worse than how Liz acted in response, and I didn’t like the way all of this was justified.

I very much liked the chemistry between the two otherwise, and also thought that their parents were a fun addition to the plot. I practically flew through the story and had a marvellous time right until the ending - I felt like the speeches at their parents‘ wedding were cringe-y and unlike their other interactions, for some reason those didn’t make me feel anything and instead felt over-the-top and stilted.

Anyway, a quick read that I mostly enjoyed! I‘m excited to see what else the author might write in the future.

4\5 stars

This one's a really tough one to rate. Firstly, this read so similarly to the love hypothesis that I had to try very hard not the compare the two. There were so many details that just felt too similar to be able to ignore. That being said, this book was different too in a lot of ways.

I really liked Liz for the most part and found myself enjoying getting to know her character. If I'm honest, I didn't love Tom. He was super indecisive and his character was also a little bit inconsistent. At some points, he was the confident womanizer and then at other times, he became the reclusive geek. The chemistry between the two leads? That was off the charts. H L McFarlane really knows how to turn up the heat.

Overall, this was a good book and I'm glad I got the chance to read it. Thank you to the publisher for kindly providing me with an ARC via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

This was mostly entertaining, but the biggest thing I can’t quite get over is the behavior of Tom, Liz’s love interest. Honestly, both Liz and Tom were very immature and thus were terrible at communicating things to each other. If that were all, I could probably bump up the rating on this a bit, but Tom’s actions definitely went overboard. It’s not that it’s not addressed in the book itself, but the way it gets explained and accepted and the way everyone moves past this behavior (for the few that actually know what happened) is… not great, lol. Like you know that’s the reasoning you’re going to get because this is a dual POV book in first person POV, so you saw Tom doing these things in earlier chapters, but at the same time those were immediate red flags. When Tom went into Liz’s phone without her knowledge… big yikes. It can’t be explained away by just saying oh, Tom’s grown up now and has learned his lesson. It felt like Tom should’ve gone to therapy and that there should’ve been some larger reason as to why he did that instead of him being childish. Idk. People don’t grow up in a week like that. Oh yes and the hotel scene, how could I forget that? Tom even realizes afterwards just how wrong he was to behave that way, but that was really uncomfortable and borderline assault (there should probably be a trigger warning for that one scene tbh). If the genre were different, maybe it'd be dubcon? But this is supposed to be a romcom, so it feels like that scene should be edited if that's not the intent.

There is some fun banter in this book, with Liz’s sarcasm and Tom’s teasing, and Liz hating Tom initially because of how he’d treated her made sense to me. Again, Tom’s reason for behaving that way is definitely like a trope from the previous decade that I don’t currently love (perhaps teenage me who read way too much shoujo manga would’ve accepted it without a second though, since this was EVERYWHERE in shoujo manga lol). The ridiculousness of their situation and how they end up working in the same lab and living in the same house are very in line with romcoms though, so I could accept it. I thought it was neat that the author incorporated things she knows and loves, like genetics and anime, although I don’t watch much anime myself so I only vaguely recognize the names of the series they mentioned. It was cute that anime was one of the things Liz and Tom bonded over.

The Unbalanced Equation had its moments, and the ending was romantic and adorable, but like the title of the book, some of the plot elements (the biggest ones having to do with Tom) prevented this from being a more enjoyable read. You kind of have to suspend a certain level of disbelief to accept what Tom does without it hurting your head.

Thanks to Netgalley and BooksGoSocial for the ARC.

This book started off strong. It’s a STEM romance in an academic setting, and is very reminiscent of The Love Hypothesis. The meet-cute in the beginning was adorable and I had high hopes. However, Tom and Liz can’t be together because the next day he’s assigned as her advisor. Makes sense. But after 4 years they didn’t reconcile and get together in a way that I enjoyed. They had very few cute moments and almost no romance between them. They just lusted after each other for majority of the book which I wasn’t a fan of… and I like smut so that’s saying something. By the end when they proclaimed their love to each other I was confused as to how they even felt that way.

That aside, I loved both characters’ attitudes, their banter, and their shameless flirting. This book was definitely funny.

I wasn’t a fan of the manipulation – from both characters. Liz seeks out to get under Tom’s skin by playing with his emotions, completely aware that he likes her. Tom is super predatory in the way that he blocked all her Tinder matches, sabotaged her apartment hunt… and the hotel room part at the convention was actually assault.

The book began to get slow at points. About halfway though, one of Liz’s friends says “It seems like literally everything would be resolved - one way or another - if you fucking talked to this man,” and I could not have agreed more.

The anime references and Halloween costumes weren’t super universal, so prepare to be confused or have to Google different shows every once in a while. I didn’t mind this though - I learned a few things. Kirby grips are just bobby pins by the way, no Nintendo reference there. I guess that’s a Scottish thing, like Calippos.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I liked this. I think? I definitely didn’t hate it. I think my mind is still processing it. It was a cute romance book that was a bit of a slow burn, second chance, he fell first, enemies (rivals?) to lovers romance book. I just dont think I’m a huge fan of the whole being step siblings and getting together. I know it’s not incest but I wasn’t even okay with this plot line on Degrassi when that was a whole thing. And yes, I did root for Clary and Jace when I read the mortal instrument books way back when they first came out but I still thought it was weird!!

It is extremely difficult for me to rate this book.

I binged it pretty quickly, and had fun doing so. At least, I did for the first half of the book. However, an incident occurs between the two MCs about halfway through that definitely is sexual harassment, and is acknowledged as such by the MMC in his inner monologue, but is never actually addressed. He never even apologies for it or checks in with the FMC on how she feels about (she was clearly uncomfortable); instead, he just pulls away and acts cold toward her as a "solution." I just didn't feel that incident got the treatment it really needed, especially since it was specifically labeled as sexual harassment by the MMC.

It also struck me as a liiiiittle odd that their parents are getting married. They're fully grown adults so it's not as icky as if they were still teenagers or something, but they are technically step siblings.

Other than those two glaring issues, I did enjoy this book. I particularly loved the banter between the two protagonists, and their chemistry was great. If I were an editor, I'd probably suggest the author either change that one scene to be less sketchy, or at least address it clearly between the two characters.

Sooo… this wasn’t great, for a lot of reasons.

I’ll start with the most obvious part: there were too many coincidences (his lab burns down, they have to work at the same place, their parents announce they’re getting married, she loses her flat, they become roommates,…). I’ll ignore those though. I knew what I was getting into, so I can’t complain. But… that’s a lot.

Then there’s the characters, Liz and Tom. Liz is 27 years old and Tom is 38, but the age gap really didn’t matter since they both acted completely immature.
They’re both manipulative in their own way, which made rooting for them difficult. Liz was constantly trying to get under Tom’s skin and did some rather questionable things, but his behaviour raised some red flags as well. For example, he keeps deleting messages she’s getting on Tinder so she won’t date anyone.

The book also has a ton of anime references that felt like they were only thrown in to make the book seem “nerdy”. There’s such a thing as *too* many references.

The book is also rather long. Too long for me. The longer the story went on, the more annoyed I got at the characters and it got so exhausting to read that I just wanted the book to be over.

The book did have some cute moments, but those were few and far between.

If you’re looking for a good enemies to lovers romance, I’d recommend you read something else.

Wow - a great read. Two very intelligent people, one of which acting like a complete toddler made for a very entertaining read. A bit of science, a bit of conflict, some parents getting remarried and a whole lot of spice.

I thought it was well written, bar a couple of words that seemed to pop up constantly. The steamy sections were done fabulously, the right amount of steam without feeling out of place, unrealistic or ick. The perfect romance book, a great setting with bad weather (again so relatable!). Loved the strong female character and the science lab workplace which made a nice change from all the books set in law firms or advertising!

Not a laugh out loud book, but were some charming funny moments. Can't wait to see more from this author.

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced reader's copy.

This book is a Love Hypothesis-ish enemies to lovers story written for an English audience. I loved the science-y vibe and step brother twist, but found the pacing off and the male character a bit off putting. It's still worth a read though!