Review of The True Love Experiment

The True Love Experiment
Author: Christina Lauren
Publisher: Gallery Books
Date of Publication: May 2023

    Felicity “Fizzy” Chen, bestselling romance novelist, is lost. She’s hit a roadblock in her career and in her life: she can’t practice what she preaches. Fizzy hasn’t ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that all-encompassing feeling? Nope. What happens when the optimism she’s spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie?
    Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and divorced father, is driven to save the marine world one adorable seal video at a time. But when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show—or else lose his job—Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with Fizzy offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? When production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.
    Fizzy and her crises are exciting because she’s a sparking telephone pole in a Midwest thunderstorm—disaster waiting to happen. Each of the characters has a few defining traits that create both the drive and the frustration of the story. There’s Fizzy: spirited, sassy, sexual. There’s Connor: calm, tall, trying to be kind and controlled while his career takes a nosedive. There are a couple voices of reason and curiosity—Fizzy’s best friend Jess, and Jess and Connor’s respective daughters. None are particularly developed beyond their functions as sources of sympathy and interrogation, but without them Fizzy and Connor would collapse. Fizzy and Connor have enough flaws and desires to make them both charming and frustrating. They are characters that you want to succeed, just maybe after a couple of hurdles. Fizzy is almost unlikeable at first. Her public persona, flirty and confident, is offset by deep insecurities about her own romantic capabilities that aren’t exactly alleviated by her continued lustful pursuits. What keeps the reader’s attention beyond her quips and feistiness is her tentative, fearful discovery in her late thirties of what it means to love and be loved by someone. She is deeply set in her patterns and habits, and breaking them takes effort and willpower.
    The reward of the story and of Fizzy’s complications is the forbidden and explosive— romance between coworkers that becomes irresistible as Fizzy and Connor’s resistance to one other collapse. The honeymoon period and the hard work of the relationship are left to be imagined after the last page, but at some point before that end, Connor and Fizzy’s relationship goes from being impossible and improper to being a necessity for them both, transitioning from the appeal of the forbidden to something more wholesome and full of positive potential. This book is fun and fast-paced, and curious about how hard it is for a person to change their romantic habits. Don’t expect a complex plot or people, but that lack does not diminish the energy and appeal.