Love on the Brain

Bestseller Hazelwood’s charming and intelligent sophomore outing (after The Love Hypothesis) follows a pair of noted young scientists on their rocky path to love. NIH neuroscientist Bee Königswasser is thrilled when she is tapped for the position of a lifetime: leading BLINK, a program that will build performance-enhancing technology for NASA astronauts. Unfortunately, her co-lead is her graduate school nemesis, Levi Ward. As Bee, who’s still nursing emotional wounds over a cheating ex-fiancé, encounters a series of obstacles in her attempts to get BLINK off the ground, she assumes Levi is stonewalling her. She takes to her popular twitter account @WhatWouldMarieDo, where she doles out advice to academics in the voice of Marie Curie, to blow off steam. She finds solace in trading quips and commiserating with the smart and witty @Shmacademics, another popular account, to whom Bee vents about working with Levi while @Shmacademics pines over a married woman. When it becomes obvious to Bee that it’s not Levi blocking her requests and instead that someone else is first subtly, then overtly, working to sabotage BLINK, she and Levi must band together to save their work. The snappy prose, engaging and twisty plot, and utterly endearing characters combine to create pure romance gold. This brainy offering should win Hazelwood even more fans. [em]Agent: Thao Le, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (Aug.) [/em]