Liquid: A Love Story

This is a subversion of the romantic comedy genre, an inquiry into the friends-to-lovers trope, and a critique of heteronormative expectations and academic sociopolitics.

After the protagonist of Liquid earns her Ph.D., it throws her whole life backward rather than advancing her career. She loses graduate student housing, her book idea is not being published, and she may not have any teaching position in the coming fall semester. With her summer free and her fall uncertain, she decides to open a spreadsheet and organize a hundred dates with the goal of marrying somebody rich by the end of the summer.

Though Liquid is written for fans of rom-coms, it unfortunately comes across as not fully delivering on the promise of the premise. We don’t get to see the majority of the one hundred dates—not even in montage format, which would have been really fun.

The narrator’s constant pontificating criticisms of everyone and everything around her gets a bit grating. It would be more satisfying if she displayed more emotional growth and worldview changes throughout the novel. That would involve leaning further into rom-com conventions. It could still be subversive while striking a better balance of detached critique and emotional sincerity.