Beginner's Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions

Solid story. I'm probably rating this lower than I would have 2 months ago because all fake dating/friends-to-lovers stories will now be measured against [b:Take a Hint, Dani Brown 49976087 Take a Hint, Dani Brown (The Brown Sisters, #2) Talia Hibbert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572990974l/49976087.SY75.jpg 72583521]. Although the two books didn't try to do exactly the same thing, I kept comparing the actions of the main characters and finding that a few things were handled with more depth and sensitivity in [b:Take a Hint, Dani Brown 49976087 Take a Hint, Dani Brown (The Brown Sisters, #2) Talia Hibbert https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572990974l/49976087.SY75.jpg 72583521] than they were in this book. However, Reyes is a relatively new author with only a few titles under her belt so I expect her to get better from here. In fact, I already enjoyed the second book in this series a lot more than I did this one.

What a surprise this book was! Beginner's Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions is a romance that is set in the Philippines, with Filipino characters, and a heroine in both academia and STEM who is likely on the autism spectrum (though it is never called out as such).

During a visit to her big, extended family's hometown for her cousin's engagement party, heroine Kaya is made to feel uncomfortable for being single, amidst all the happy couples around her. In the only way she knows how, as a scientist, she begins to conduct an experiment with the assistance of her lab mate: to find herself a romantic partner, or to determine conclusively once and for all that she's not suitable for relationships, as she suspects. Oops! She falls in love. :)

Her relationship with Nero, the man who owns the coffee shop Kaya and her lab mate always hang out at, is really sweet. There's no actual sex, but the chemistry between them is obvious (and hot). The book is very oriented around Kaya's relationship with her family members, and it's clear how important they are to her, and how much their opinions matter to her. I really enjoyed it, especially once I got used to being inside Kaya's very-logical head.

What was, to me, so interesting about the way the story was set up, was that the setting, the characters, were never described. As a western reader, I recognize this as my own bias in that I tend to mentally place stories in places I know, if it's not explicitly called out, so I mistakenly assumed Beginner's Guide was set in the U.S. or U.K. Kaya is not really interested in describing the world around her, and so I was already a decent way into the book when I realized that the university she works at was set in the Philippines. (And really, I only realized that because she said she was going to visit her extended family in Tagaytay, and I looked it up on my Kindle because I didn't know where that city was.) I think it's neat, and good, to have my expectations and assumptions thwarted. Hopefully I'll learn to stop assuming I know stuff when I don't.

It's a great story, with wonderful supporting characters and lots of love and care and honesty.

Read for #RomanceSparksJoy. (I think this might be #ownvoices? I'm not positive. I've done some googling and it looks like Six de los Reyes is a pen name, and I couldn't find much about her.)

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. I think I admired the book a little more than I actually enjoyed it. I appreciated the fact that Six de los Reyes doesn't dumb down her heroine, Kaya, but it's hard to feel connected to her intellectual discourse on science and relationships, and you really have to read carefully between the lines to find her emotional vulnerabilities. Still it was very rewarding to watch her slowly come out of the lab and both make friends and find love. The book was very funny and the ending swoon-worthy, but at times I couldn't understand how the hero had as much patience as he did to wait for Kaya to come to her senses. Looks like the author is planning on sequels for two of the secondary characters; I would put them on the “to be considered” rather than the “auto buy” category.