Iris Oxtabee has managed to navigate the tricky world of unspoken social interactions by reading everything from neuroscience journals to Wikipedia articles. Science has helped her fit the puzzle pieces into an understandable whole, and she’s sure there’s nothing it can’t explain. Love, for example, is just chemistry.
Her best friend Seth, however, believes love is one of life’s beautiful and chaotic mysteries, without need for explanation. Iris isn’t one to back down from a challenge; she’s determined to prove love is really nothing more than hormones and external stimuli. After all, science has allowed humanity to understand more complex mysteries than that, and Iris excels at science.
The perfect way to test her theory? Get the popular and newly-single Theo Grant, who doesn’t even know Iris exists, to ask her to prom. With prom just two weeks away, Iris doesn’t have any time to waste, so she turns her keen empirical talents and laser-focus attention to testing her theory.
But will proving herself correct cause her friendship with Seth—and the tantalizing possibility for something more—to become the failed experiment?
I wish I'd liked this more than I did. On one level it's a nice story about a girl finding her real boyfriend after a diversion into the wrong one. On another, it's a story about a girl treating everyone around her as either test subjects or servants and being very impatient when they don't act the way she wants.
Now, you're going to say 'that's very mean, B! She's neuro-divergent, she can't help herself.' And yes, she is divergent. But she's explicitly very intelligent. Has she never read anything about using humans as lab rats? Has no one ever said anything to her about it? She spends a lot of time reminding herself that she's smarter than everyone around her, but she still gets confused when they don't know things she knows or follow her leaps of logic immediately. We're all guilty of that sometimes, but she does it all the time.
I'm probably still being unfair. Her point of view and way of thinking just grated on me, and it's all from her point of view. It seemed to me that she was treating her friends really badly, to the point of being irritated that one had a job, to earn money he needed, because it cut into time he could have been spending doing things for her. And again, I know, some people need routine and things to stay the same. She just seemed really ungrateful to me.
But this is just one opinion, from one person. So I really hope you, the reader who is not me, enjoys it. Maybe you will! Maybe it'll be your favourite read this year. That would be great. But, sadly, it's not my favourite.
Prom Theory publishes on the 30th March, 2021. I received a free copy and am providing an honest review.
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