ARC Book Review: Love and Other Theories by Alexis Bass

Format: e-ARC
Source: Publisher via Edelweiss
Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication Date: December 31, 2014
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If you want more, you have to give less.

That’s the secret to dating in high school. By giving as little as they expect to get in return, seventeen-year-old Aubrey Housing and her three best friends have made it to the second semester of their senior year heartbreak-free. And it’s all thanks to a few simple rules: don’t commit, don’t be needy, and don’t give away your heart.So when smoking-hot Nathan Diggs transfers to Lincoln High, it shouldn’t be a big deal. At least that’s what Aubrey tells herself. But Nathan’s new-boy charm, his kindness, and his disarming honesty throw Aubrey off her game and put her in danger of breaking the most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love.

My Thoughts:

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn't expecting wonderful things when I requested this book but damn if I wasn’t slightly disappointed. Yes, I knew that it wouldn’t be all sunshine and butterflies based on that summary alone, but I also wasn’t expecting the deceit and betrayals. And honestly, I’m not sure if I would have read it if I had known. Now, before you write this book off as one that you’ll never read, please keep in mind that the issues that I had with this book are based on my own personal views and I believe that some of the things that I had a problem with won’t bother everybody so if this sounds like the type of book that you would like, then you should give it a chance.

Love and Other Theories starts off to a great start, we’re introduced to Aubrey and her friends and their evolved theories on dating and love in high school. Aubrey seems to be content with the theories and the way that she has to be, until Nathan.

Nathan had me from the get go, he was smart and caring and I thought he was exactly what Aubrey needed to pull her head out of the theory cloud and he was…for a while.

I don’t want to go into specifics about the story and Aubrey’s relationships lest I ruin everything but let’s just say I was really enjoying the first half but then some things happen and everyone acts like it was ok that it had happened, but if that would have happened to me, there would have been hell to pay, and I honestly don’t know how someone could have ‘overlooked’ these things and pretended everything was fine, but hey, that’s just me.

I know that shitty things happen and things like what happened in this book happen every day, and that’s fine. While I don’t agree with it, that wasn’t the major problem for me. My problem was, how someone could just be ok with it or at least pretend to be ok with it. It’s not ok to be treated that way and it just pissed me off the way that everyone seemed to think it was.

Overall, I think Love and Other Theories will be loved by a lot of readers, unfortunately it just pushed the wrong buttons for me.