Intermediate Thermodynamics is a romance between an aerospace engineer (“literally a rocket scientist”) and a screenwriter in LA. The cover bills it as a romantic comedy, which is fitting since it’s all told from the point of view of the heroine.

Esther (the rocket scientist) and Jinny are best friends. Jinny has just broken up with an emotionally abusive man named Stuart but is considering going back to him. In an attempt to stave this off, Esther decides to set Jinny up with Esther’s neighbor, Jonathan. Jinny can’t know that she’s being set up, because Jinny’s mom is always try to set her up with potential husbands and as a result Jinny has an aversion to the entire concept. So Esther tells Jonathan that if he will call Jinny and ask her out three times, Esther will advise him on the science in his science fiction screenplay.

By the time the three dates are over with, Jinny and Jonathan have decided that they are not that into each other, and Jinny has decided not to settle for either evil (Stuart) or bland (Jonathan, in the sense that he and Jinny lack chemistry). Meanwhile, Esther and Jonathan hang out a lot working on his script and start to become friends. To Esther’s dismay, she begins to think of him less as an annoying neighbor and more as a pretty cute and endearing guy.

Readers, I have a confession to make. I had no idea that there’s a friendship code that states that you can never date your friend’s ex, even if they only went out three times. All through high school and college my friends and I didn’t really go on dates so much as we tripped and fell headlong into long, serious relationships with someone else in the same group until we broke up and fell headlong into a serious relationship with someone else from the same group, and so on until all possible variations were exhausted or the group drifted apart thanks to graduations and so forth. I’ve only had three boyfriends in my life, one of whom I married, and yet in order to explain the complex web of relationships involving my friends and these guys I’d have to make one of those charts that looks like a multi-colored spider web.

This being the case, it was difficult for me to relate to the central conflict, which is that Esther can’t date Jonathan because of the friendship code. The other central conflict is that Esther shouldn’t have set Jinny up. I beg to differ, because Stuart was an abusive sack of shit and Jinny was clearly on her way back to him. This was a Code Red situation, not “I’m going to mess with my friend’s love life because there’s nothing good on TV and I’m bored.” I know, I know, good friends respect each other’s boundaries and baggage and let their friends make their own decisions, but I still say WELL DONE ESTHER.

Obviously, I spent a lot of this book wanting to knock people’s heads together, but I identified with a lot of it too because the emotions are so vividly and often painfully portrayed. Esther has never had a serious relationship and her terror of opening her heart causes problems between her and Jinny as friends and her and Jonathan as lovers. Meanwhile Esther is in a codependent relationship with her needy mother and every conversation between Esther and her family members rang true. Esther’s depression when she loses both Jinny and Jonathan made me want to take to my bed out of pure sympathy. “Just quit your job,” I wanted to tell Esther. “You go ahead and eat all the cheese you want.”

I loved the fact that Esther prioritizes her relationship with her best friend over any potential relationship with a guy, and I loved Esther’s knitting group (like my mom, Esther is addicted to knitting socks). For someone who is afraid of emotional commitment, Esther has a lot of relationships with both women and men. She’s not written as emotionally stunted because of being a geek, or because of being ambitious in her career. Her problems stem from the family she grew up with, and those problems make her feel like a well-rounded, complex character as opposed to a stereotype.

I also loved Esther and Jonathan’s journey from awkwardness to comfortable friendship to love. However, I never felt that we got to know Jonathan that well in comparison to Esther. Because the book is so focused on Esther, she’s the one who does most of the changing and she’s the one whose thought processes we are privy to. Jonathan changes, but it’s harder to get a sense of how much he changes without getting in his head. Also: once Esther and Jonathan work out their problems the book just ends in mid-conversation. Yes, all the arcs are resolved, but it’s still an awkward ending.

Even though I did love the romance, which involves bonding over science fiction movies and eating (two of my favorite things) I felt like the focus was less on romance and more on whether Esther could let go of the defense mechanism she learned in childhood. These techniques affected all of her relationships, not just romantic ones. Because the book is billed as “romantic comedy,” which is usually structured slightly differently from straight up romance, it’s not a problem. It’s just something to be aware of when you start reading the book. I loved the book except for the ending, which made me feel like I was missing a page or at least a paragraph.