Not In Love is the newest contemporary adult romance from Ali Hazelwood and the tone is somewhat different from her others. Rue and Eli meet and find they have a strong attraction to one another, but Rue doesn’t do repeats so they leave it at that. However, they soon find themselves thrust into each other’s presence as well as on opposite sides of a messy business take over. The attraction doesn’t fade and they are drawn to each other for other reasons as well.
I’ll be honest, I had a really hard time connecting with these characters for the majority of the book. Rue is detached from the other world and Eli comes across as a guy who is out to sabotage everything Rue and her friends have worked for. It’s hard to root for a couple when there’s no reason to want them together. It’s Ali Hazelwood, though, and I’ve loved all of her books, so I pressed on and I did love how it all came together. The last 25% or so of the book shed light on what was actually going on and explained the motives of both characters in much more detail. To some degree I understand why Hazelwood left this until end for Rue to discover but it would have helped me as a reader to be more engaged with the characters, especially Eli, if I’d had more of that information earlier in the story. Then I could have been rooting for him even when Rue wasnt.
Overall, I did enjoy the story, but it won’t be on my re-read shelf as most of Hazelwood’s other books are.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down.
Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through—and he’s a man who gets what he wants. With one burning exception: Rue. The woman he can’t stop thinking about. The woman who’s off-limits to him.
Torn between loyalty and an undeniable attraction, Rue and Eli throw caution out the lab and the boardroom windows. Their affair is secret, no-strings-attached, and has a built-in deadline: the day one of their companies will prevail. But the heart is risky business—one that plays for keeps.
