As usual, Christina Lauren released another amazing enemies to lovers book, except this time it came with the concept of soulmates.Â
The Soulmate Equation follows single mother Jessica Davis in her journey with the app DNADuo and her high match of compatibility with the app’s creator River Peña.
Essentially DNADuo is an app where participants can send in samples of their spit to multiple scientists. Once there, the strands of DNA will be compared to others before giving a statistic of how compatible they are with each other.
DNADuo and GeneticAlly (the company name) was created by River to try and scientifically match people in the world with their soulmate.Â
Jess and River have a very sweet meet cute in my opinion. By the time they meet, all Jess knows about him is that he gets the same Americano every time he visits her and Fizzy’s (Jess’s best friend) favorite coffee shop.
Jess is surprisingly the one to make the first move by grabbing River’s arm (or as she knew him, Americano) and asking if the rumor of him being a matchmaker was true.Â
In a large blur of words River explains that he is a geneticist and that he was designing an app (DNADuo) and even goes as far as inviting Fizzy and Jess to be a part of their trial.
When the two women go, they get a deeper insight into what GeneticAlly actually is and the level of matches, with base being the lowest and diamond being the highest.
At first, Jess is skeptical about sending in her spit and just allows Fizzy to participate, until one night she throws all caution to the wind and actually sends in a sample.
While she thinks no harm can come of this, she then receives a call regarding a meeting with GeneticAlly about her soulmate match. When she arrives at the meeting, the news is revealed that she and River have a 98% soulmate match.
Even though River is one of the hottest characters that Christina Lauren has ever written, Jess is less than pleased with being River’s soulmate.
During the first part of their relationship, River is cold and snarky towards the woman who will soon become his love interest. This in turn caused Jess to form a dislike towards him.Â
Despite her hating that she was his soulmate Jess agreed to start a trial relationship with him for money, which she so desperately needed to help pay for things for her daughter Juno.
So, their relationship starts and like DNADuo it is quickly thrust into the spotlight.Â
As time goes on, feelings grow, fade and come back. The book honestly made me ponder the question if science can actually find people’s soulmates.
In my opinion, I loved that River and Jess’s relationship started out a little bit rocky because it gave them room to grow together. It also helped Jess become more open with sharing her life with him.Â
Even though the Soulmate Equation is a romance book, it also does a good job at describing the hardships of being a single parent and growing up with a neglective mother.Â
Despite this book making me laugh and fall in love with both River (who like I said is one of the hottest characters they have ever written) and Jess (who is so sweet and relatable), I did not like the twist added into the book at the end.
Personally, I was able to guess the twist multiple chapters before it even happened. It was predictable and the ending was able to be guessed soon before it happened.
I would have preferred the twist to be either left out or changed in a way that wasn’t so predictable. It also did not help that there were multiple twists in the book because it felt rushed and messy at times.
Regardless, The Soulmate Equation was an amazing book and I loved watching Jess and River go from science rivals to science soulmates.