3.75 out of 5 stars rounded up
I give a book 3 stars if it was readable and gave me all the elements I would expect from the genre. Howe's The Make Up Test was your average second chance romance but it did the elements well. It never felt like it was just checking off the elements.
Probably what helped elevate the rating is the inclusion of a plus sized MC. Howe did a good job of including a plus sized character and not patting themselves on the back for doing so. The inclusion of a women in higher education also pushed the rating higher. I could not give it a start 4 stars though because it did shake up the genre a bit it didn't do anything to wow me.
My two big complaints is the dating sucks and men sucks because some man hurt me boohoo schtick and Colin's constant character descriptions. Having your heart broken by someone you have given your whole heart too especially when it appears to have nefarious reasons sucks but I am over it being a story element, that is totally on me. I know it speaks to others I have just read quite a few recently and it's getting a little old. As for Colin's character descriptions, I think they were included to showcase how different they are physically but we need some synonyms or something.
I would recommend this book to someone who wanted a plus size romance book that was readable but nothing that would become their next all time favorite. It was overall ok but never wow'd me.

I requested The Make-Up Test because Ali Hazelwood recommended it and because of its academic setting. Unfortunately, The Make-Up Test is driven by lack of communication and the main characters have little to no chemistry.

Almost all of the drama of this novel could have been avoided had the love interest, Colin, been honest and communicated with Allison. Their first break up and the third act break up could have been avoided entirely.

Colin is not a swoon worthy character, nor is he a good person. His reason for what he did before they broke up the first time was insufficient and, personally, I think Allison deserved better. Their third act breakup was just ridiculous.

I can’t tell you how many times Colin’s hair gel and cardigans were mentioned. I also can’t think of a more unattractive smell to smell like than hair gel. Yuck.

In their time apart, Colin becomes a better person. Instead of making Allison cower to fatphobic comments, he suddenly became some approximation of a white knight. This change wasn’t earned, nor was it necessary. Colin should have been a better person from the beginning and not expect Allison to put up with verbal abuse.

One of the only interesting relationships in this novel was Allison’s friendship with Sophie. There comes a time in every friendship where careers and growing families pull friendships apart and force them to adapt to new realities. I would have loved to see Allison and Sophie try to navigate their developing friendship, but instead Howe turns Sophie into a terrible friend through her actions and her (correct) opinions regarding Colin.

The Make-Up Test also briefly touches on strained and toxic familial relationships. I applauded Allison’s choices regarding her father, but Howe included a slight redemption for him then never develpped it further making it completely irrelevant and, again, not earned.

Overall, The Make-Up Test was a disappointing romance with no chemistry, terrible people, and lack of communication as the primary source of tension.

This book sounded like one I would typically love - enemies to lovers and second chance romance? Two of my favorite tropes. However, I struggled with how competitive they were. It really messed with my ability to enjoy the book like I wanted too.

This was cute and I had a good time. I do think it could be greatly improved by being dual pov. I felt like we were in the dark for everything colin did and does a disservice to the book.

I received an arc through netgalley.

Thank you netgalley for letting me read this advanced readers copy in exchange for my completely honest review! I loved Allison, but Colin I was very unsure about like 50 percent of the time. I think I just was never sure if I could truly trust him. Also the twist and turns at the end of this really threw me. I did feel like the end was a little rushed but it still overall was a good book! It even had some smut to spice it up a little bit!

This novel was just okay-really not memorable or engaging. The problems that a main character, Allison, has are over related and repeated seemingly to add to the plot but really added to my total dislike of her. I just could not connect with her nor care about how things would turn out.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Make-Up Test by Jenny Howe is a second chance, enemies to lovers romance with a side of forced proximity, and plus side representative.

Allison Avery is a hard-working and determined grad student who is starting a TA position with a professor who teaches her dream subject. However, quickly Avery find herself in an unlikely situation when it is announced that there will be two TA positions and the empty seat is being vine to Colin Benjamin. Colin and Allison dated through undergrad but split due to Colin’s competitive personality (and other reasons that justified a break up).

I was really looking forward to this book. I ADORED Allison’s character but did NOT like Colin’s character. I thought he was rude and EXTRA competitive. I liked how he tried to win back Allison but still wished he did more.

The writing style wasn’t my fav and I couldn’t get into the past/present style but the last half I got used to it and enjoyed it!!

Overall, this is a good enjoyable book.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

2.5/5 stars... *spoilers*
First, I am very grateful for having been given an advanced copy of this book, and while I did not enjoy it, other people will. I am not hating on the author, I just personally did not enjoy the story.
It just was not for me.. I was really excited for this arc because the premise of academic rivals to lovers fighting for a single spot in a PhD program seemed amazing. It started out as expected with Colin being a dick, but I was like "That's to be expected, he'll get better as the book goes on." I was wrong.
Starting with Colin: if you asked this man to define "communication" he would look at you with a blank stare. He has never communicated properly a day in his life. You would think if he had issues with communication (or a lack thereof) in his previous relationship with Allison, he would realize he needs to communicate better with her the second time around. Nope, he did not learn. Shockingly, his poor communication caused a huge rift/break-up between him and Allison, again. What does he do to fix it? Randomly shows up at her place in knightly shining armor telling her he's so sorry and wants to get back together. Not my thing, but to each their own.
Moving onto Allison. (Please note: I am also a people pleaser to my core, and I understand Allison's need to make people around her happy and not to 'rock the boat') Throughout the entire book, she lets people walk all over her (*cough cough* her mom *cough cough*). Her mom gives her grief the WHOLE book about Allison not wanting to be around her father anymore (because he never gave her what she needed in a dad) and Allison doesn't stick up for herself. She continues going back whenever her mom asks. And when Colin does *that* with his presentation she decided not to go forward with talking to her professor about it, just letting it slide.
On another note: I really liked Sophie, she was cool.
Anyways, while I did not enjoy this book, other people do and will love it. This is just my own personal experience, and again I am very grateful for having been given an advanced copy of this book,

Ok so second chance romance is either a hit or miss for me. No In-between for some reason. It’s either done really well l, or done horrible. This was one of the unfortunate ones who fall under the not so well done. That may just be me, but I could not and I mean could not connect or even root for these two main characters. It was just meh

I can't believe this is a debut author - the writing is great! I liked the second chance romance trope a lot! I was so mad at one point but it was explained well and redeemed the story. There is some fat-phobia by secondary characters, but the main character has a very body positive attitude.

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Second chance romance/enemies-to-lovers in a grad school setting! How could I resist?

Unfortunately, I didn't connect to this book the way I hoped to, and I wasn't rooting for this couple the way you should in a romance novel. Allison and Colin dated for a while in college, and end up in the same grad school program years later. There is clearly a lot of anger for Allison because of their break-up, and also towards her father, and these are two central issues throughout this book. I felt like we didn't get enough time on page with Allison actually being happy or having a wide range of emotions. The competition in their dynamic felt really frustrating to me, because the fact that Colin was competing for Allison's spot was really irredeemable at this point in their relationship. Even when his motivations are revealed, it doesn't make me feel great about his character or their relationship. Another thing that drove me actually crazy while reading was the frequency that Allison lied to make herself look better to her teacher or Colin. It was so obvious to me that she would eventually be found out-- and it seemed so immature. Overall, I just have so many complaints and not enough great feelings about this book.

On the bright side, I liked the setting. I was intrigued by their area of study: medieval literature. Scenarios where these two characters were teaching about Beowulf and discussing it were the only parts of the book I think I truly enjoyed.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a chance to read this e-ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts!

This delightful book kept me up long hours into the night (or shall I say knight?!) Allison and Colin, once lovers, meet again at a university, but this time they are in a Ph.D. program. Both TA's for Professor Wendy, they are competing for the single advisee position which is pivotal for a tenure track. Along the way, bragging and being cautious soon leads to sparks flying.

What I enjoyed about this book was seeing the maturity and personal growth each character goes through from their first relationship to their second friendship. Can current events make up for past heart aches? Can Allison look beyond another betrayal?! This will be the ultimate make-up test!!

Thank you to Jenny Howe, the publisher, and NetGalley for this advance readers copy in exchange for my honest review. I look forward to reading more books by Jenny!

I didn’t love this book. And I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if I even liked this book. It wasn’t bad but I couldn’t really connect with Allison and I didn’t feel the chemistry between her and Colin like I was hoping to. Also a strange comment, but she mentioned scooping her corgi up under her arm and unless Monty was less than a year old that’s really not plausible with a corgi (I can barely hold my 18lb corgi with one arm and she’s on the small side). I liked the academic back and forth between Colin and Allison even though I didn’t understand the Medieval English references.

Former lovers to enemies to lovers, sweet and heartfelt story about coming of age and navigating love and academia.

Allison Avery and Colin Benjamin are not only exes turned academic rivals, they will now have to compete for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance in their college careers.

The Make-Up Test is a unique twist on a rivals to lovers romance. The plot to this book sounded interesting and there was quite a bit of hype from other authors but it just doesn’t follow through. I love academic, nerdy romances but this one was not for me.

Neither of the main characters are particularly relatable or even likable. They are written in an “opposites-attract” way, but their behavior towards each other is so juvenile.

The book itself seems too long for the plot. The storyline dragged on unnecessarily. There were definitely some pacing issues.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press!

Thank you St. Martins Press for the gifted eARC.

DNF @ 34%. At the point I decided to stop reading there was nothing "wrong" with it, it just wasn't holding my attention enough to want to continue. The constant remembering of how things used to be and the pining over an ex who didn't seem so great wasn't really working for me. Basing my 3 stars on what I had read so far - "it was fine".

I wanted to love this but the storyline was waaaaaay too muddled. There was too much going on between the friendship between Sophie and Allison, Allison’s family relationships, the academic stuff, Wendy’s classes and the relationship with Colin. The romance wasn’t even that believable because it seemed like there were a ton of unresolved issues between Colin and Allison.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, a generous, maybe too generous, 3 stars.
Like, it wasn't the worst book I've read this year (shout out to The Dead Romantics) but it certainly wasn't great or even necessarily _good_. The leads were not interesting. Maybe I'm just too old for their 23 year old nonsense, but having your BIG LOVE/the one who got away~~ be someone you dated for 8 (E I G H T) entire months your sophomore year in college is maybe hugely stupid? Also in maybe I'm too old for this news, her casually frequently drinking to excess is not a cute character trait. That scene where she drank like 6 bud lites in a row because of her ~life drama? Literally grow up. And UGH that bit where she is SO immature that she literally shoves herself and Colin into a mud puddle because one of her students was nearby at the zoo was truly the dumbest thing.
These characters feel Extremely YA so it's weird this is being marketed as an ~adult romance. Neither of these people deserve happiness.
PS: it's dumb, but having a Colin/Cole character was genuinely confusing.

This book has a lot of tropes I am interested in. Like academic rivals, second chance romance, etc. It took me a couple of chapters to get into this book, which was not an issue at all because when I got into it, I was not able to get out. The tropes were perfectly explored by the author and I loved how you can actually see the growth of the love interest in this book as you go along because, Of course, pobodys nerfect. It has a twist at the end which I kind of saw coming but not really it was also written and executed perfectly by the author. But I would really want you to give this book a chance. It's amazing.
I Spoilers ahead €
I gave it 4's because the reason for the first break up between the characters kind of pissed me off. It was kind of "I broke up with you because I knew what was better for you' which I don't really prefer but it's really subjective.

The Make-Up Test was innocuously just-ok for about 85%, and the final 15% reduced me to a pile of incandescent rage. My reviews of other ARCs here speak, I hope, to the fact that I really do try to review books - especially ARCs from debut authors - with an even hand and an open mind. I came to The Make-Up Test with enthusiasm and excitement for the premise. But the conclusion hit really, really close to home by holding up some of academia's most pernicious ideas, in particular glorifying and upholding women's burden to blunt their ambition to stroke the ego of their male colleagues.

The basic premise of this book is that Allison and Colin were academic rivals as undergraduates at Brown. They broke up (for reasons left unnecessarily mysterious to the reader for half the book) only to find themselves, two years later, academic rivals once again in grad school. They are both Medievalists vying for the same position working with a superstar advisor who has (rather unprofessionally, I think) turned her one mentorship slot into a semester-long academic Hunger Games. Colin and Allison both want the slot, and in the course of fighting over it, fall back in love.

Things started out with some winsome characterization. Allison has a lot of very-relatable grad-school anxieties and insecurities, Colin has a few character details (a loud squawky laugh, a penchant for cardigans) that felt unique. However, the treatment of the primary romantic conflict between them quickly lost me. Colin and Allison swung back and forth between hating each other and getting along with very little external or internal motivation for their attitude changes. In the flashback scenes and in the present ones, Colin vacillated between being a pompous self-important jerk, and being so demonstratively soft and vulnerable it felt, in comparison, like an act he put on to seem like a "nice guy." Allison would change her mind about him with little prompting, and neither of them explored at any point where exactly their obsession with academic competition was coming from.

But what started to sneak up on me as I was reading was that... the book was silently omitting a major consideration about Allison and Colin's Competitive Hijinks. Colin is repeatedly presented to the reader as less motivated, less prepared, and less knowledgeable than Allison. Many of his academic ideas are shown, quite rightly, to be under-considered and underbaked. In the past storyline, we learn that he broke up with her in an incredibly immature way because of his own intellectual insecurities. (He at one point whines that he didn't get into grad school initially because he wasn't able to stand out against all the other straight white male applicants, which sounds like a rather pernicious repetition of the bogus idea that it's "harder" for cishet white men to succeed in academia???). Allison's work, by comparison, is presented to readers as careful and incisive, based on nearly a decade of study in a field that Colin has just casually dropped into within the last two years.

And it started to occur to me that.... well, it's a bit odd that we are never asked to consider whether Colin's ability to constantly outcompete Allison - in her own field - for institutional accolades might be based on how others react to him as a conventionally attractive cishet white man? And to her as a young, plus-sized woman? This dynamic particularly comes through in the teaching scenes. Allison's recitation students often act openly dismissive of her, talk over her, and generally ignore her expertise. The students all, in contrast, think Colin is a genius intellectual rockstar. If the text had given us an example of their differing teaching styles, I might be able to buy this dynamic. But their actual skills don't factor into the narrative at all. And... I just... there is extensive research into gender bias in the classroom and how it affects student reception of teachers. But the book never presents that as a possible explanation?

Still, I was ready to chalk this up to a plotting omission. Maybe the book had just forgotten to show me whether Colin was, in fact, earning his superstar reputation?

And then the ending happened. And I... dissolved into a pile of rage.

(I'm going to get a bit spoilery here, so look away if you don't want to be spoiled.)

Essentially, Colin and Allison have to give a big presentation that is going to help determine which one of them gets the coveted graduate mentorship. Allison has been working on her presentation - about beauty as beastliness - for the better part of a year. She enthusiastically shares her ideas with Colin, and then asks him to share his. He has approximately 2.5 unoriginal and underdeveloped ideas, and she (very patiently, and with extreme care for his feelings) explains based on her expertise that most of those have already been done, encourages him to explore the least awful idea. He instead rocks up the day of his presentation (which takes place before hers) and opens his PowerPoint to reveal that he has stolen the TITLE AND TOPIC OF ALLISON'S PRESENTATION. At which point she storms out. Understandably.

We then go through a series of narrative contortions where it's suggested that this blatant plagiarism is actually a good thing for Allison, because it will force her to think of new and even BETTER ideas. Ideas that she has to stay up all night preparing while at her father's funeral. Hands up, women in academia, if you've ever had to take on additional labor because some dude couldn't be bothered to do his own work!

Later it comes to light that Colin actually analyzed a slightly different text than Allison planned to analyze. And the book actually, sincerely, suggests we blame HER for jumping to conclusions and storming out of his presentation before she could realize the slight differences in their approach. I mean, come on. He stole her title. And her topic. And she texted him multiple times as he was preparing, to ask why he had been distant. (His only explanation is that his grandfather was sick, and that... I kid you not... he knew building off her original idea was the only way to "level the playing field" and have a chance against her). And with very little discussion, she not only takes him back, but spends a long time beating herself up for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, this, right here, is the sentence that sealed it for me. This is what Allison says to Colin after he stole her idea, and then failed to tell her about it, and then harassed her to get back together with him:

"Colin. You're every bit as smart as me. And a hundred times more charismatic." She sighed. "It's my fault you don't feel that way."


Yes, that's right. It's Allison's fault. For not sufficiently stroking this man's ego while he stole her ideas. I could probably write a thousand more words about how absolutely toxic this is. How this book glamorizes the emotional labor of reassuring cishet white men of their genius. But honestly, this book doesn't deserve that much of my time.

I will mention a couple different things in passing that readers might want to be aware of if they pick up this book: it's set in a "post-COVID" future, though that really only shows up in 2-3 parentheticals where Allison looks back and thinks about the pandemic, glad that it's over (*sob*). There is a subplot with Allison's emotionally abusive father, who constantly criticizes her weight and her career choices. While Allison does finally set some boundaries, the narrative mostly undermines them by having his secretary show up at the funeral to tell Allison he actually said nice things about her. At his office. Where she couldn't hear them. "Your abusive parent was secretly nice about you behind your back" is not a plot point I have any time for.

Anyway, maybe I went in too hard on this book. I will fully admit to it hitting some personal areas of sensitivity. But, you know, those of you reading this might share some of those! So, if you've ever been a woman in academia, as I am, and felt like you had to work two times as hard for half the recognition, if you've ever watched a male colleague rake in teaching accolades while you're dinged for being too "moody" or not "cool" enough, don't worry: this book is here to tell you it's your fault, actually, for not encouraging his mediocre ideas enough.

*sigh*