Can you actually fall in love with a trope you've read a hundred times just because someone whispers it to you in Portuguese?
Apparently, yes. Yes, you absolutely can.
I was three hours deep into a branding project for a local bakery — Frida curled on my keyboard, Diego doing his patented stare-of-judgment from the bookshelf — when Thais Motta's delivery of Adam Carlsen's first actual vulnerable moment hit me so hard I accidentally duplicated an entire artboard. Just sat there, cursor blinking, heart doing that stupid fluttery thing. At 2 PM on a Wednesday. Over a fake dating romance I already knew the plot of because I read the English version two years ago.
This book felt like rewatching a telenovela you've already seen with your abuela, but in a different dub, and somehow the new voices make you notice things you missed the first time.
The Thing About Olive That Gets Me Every Time
Look, I know Olive Smith is not breaking new ground as a romance protagonist. Nerdy PhD student, awkward, self-deprecating, thinks she's unlovable — we've met her before. But listening to her in Brazilian Portuguese gave her this different texture? Thais Motta leans into Olive's spiraling inner monologue with this breathless comedic energy that made me genuinely laugh out loud during the fake-kiss-panic scene in a way I didn't when I read it in English. There's this moment early on where Olive is mentally calculating the statistical probability of Adam Carlsen reporting her to the dean, and Motta delivers it with such frantic sincerity that I could feel Olive's cortisol spiking through my headphones.
The slow burn between Olive and Adam still works its magic even when you know exactly where it's going. That's the test of a good romance, right? Not whether the destination surprises you, but whether the road there makes your chest tight. And it does. The conference scene — you know the one, where everything shifts and the power dynamics get ugly — hit different in audio. Motta's voice cracks just barely when Olive realizes what's happening, and I had to pause my design work because my eyes were blurring. Crying session number one. (Yes, I logged it.)
Thais Motta Is Doing the Lord's Work in Romance Audiobooks
Here's what I'll say about this narrator: her comedic timing is razor sharp, but what really got me was how she handles Adam. She doesn't do a deep voice or try to sound masculine — instead she shifts her tone to something more clipped, more contained, and it captures that thing about Adam where he's always holding himself back. You can hear the restraint. And when that restraint finally cracks? My heart. MY HEART.
The vibes are immaculate for a single-narrator romance — she doesn't try to be a full cast, she just trusts the emotional shift between characters and lets you fill in the rest. I listen at 1.0x because I'm savoring, and at that speed, you catch every little breath she takes before Adam's more loaded lines. It's intimate in a way that made me feel slightly intrusive, like I was eavesdropping on two people falling in love in a Stanford lab at midnight.
One small thing — the secondary characters (Anh, Malcolm, Jeremy) kind of blend together vocally. If you zone out during a group scene, you might lose track of who's talking. Not a dealbreaker, but I noticed it around the halfway point when my brain was also trying to align vector paths.
Where the Formula Shows Its Seams
I'm not going to pretend this is a perfect book. The third act conflict still feels manufactured — the betrayal reveal relies on Olive being conveniently naive about academic politics in a way that doesn't quite track for someone who's survived a PhD program. And some of the side characters exist purely as plot furniture. I wanted more from Anh, specifically. She deserved better than being the catalyst for a fake-dating setup and then fading into the background.
Honestly, the secondary women in Check & Mate get a slightly better deal — not perfect, but Hazelwood at least lets them have some edge.
But here's the thing — Ali Hazelwood writes STEM women who feel real in their insecurities about belonging. As a first-gen college-adjacent person (art school dropout, but still), that imposter syndrome Olive carries around? I felt that in my bones. The scene where she talks about not fitting into academia, about always waiting for someone to tap her on the shoulder and say she doesn't belong — Motta delivers that monologue so quietly, so carefully, it broke me. Crying session number two. Abuela would have loved this one, would've said "esa niña necesita más confianza" and then cried right alongside me.
That specific feeling of being seen as a woman who doesn't quite fit the spaces she's earned — I found it hit me just as hard in Have You Seen Luis Velez?, though that one wrecked me in an entirely different register.
Who Gets to Ugly-Cry and Who Should Just Keep Scrolling
If you love fake-dating slow burns with a grumpy-sunshine dynamic and you're cool with a predictable-but-warm trajectory, this is your rainy Sunday book. If you need plot twists or hate the "she doesn't know he's already in love with her" trope, you're going to be frustrated by hour six. And if you speak Portuguese or are learning — honestly, Motta's delivery is so clear and expressive that this doubles as a genuinely enjoyable immersion listen.
The Feels
This book is comfort food. It's not reinventing the genre. But Thais Motta's narration adds this warmth and humor that made me fall for a story I already knew the ending to, and that's kind of the whole point of romance, isn't it? You're not there for the surprise. You're there for the feeling. And the feeling? Chef's kiss.
Four crying sessions across two books (English and Portuguese) for the same story. I'm adding that to the spreadsheet with zero shame.
