Our heroine, Elizabeth Zott, is a brilliant female chemist, clearly superior in talent to her male bosses and coworkers. Unfortunately, this is the sexist and restrictive 1950s. She and fellow chemist (and Nobel Prize nominee) Calvin Evans "meet cute" -- and although she initially resists his advances, the chemistry between the two of them is undeniable and explosive.
Elizabeth's knowledge of chemistry gets put to use in an unexpected setting: after losing her laboratory job, she becomes the unlikely television host of an afternoon cooking show, Supper at Six, where she delivers chemistry lessons along with the recipe of the day ("cooking is chemistry," she says) and a side dish of subversive messages to a receptive audience of dissatisfied housewives.
I found myself thinking, early on, that Elizabeth's character was just a WEE bit unrealistic. She's far more 2023 in her mindset and attitudes than 1950s/early 1960s (even for the feminists of the time, I think). Many of the male characters were almost comically sexist and villainous. Also a little hard to swallow: Six-Thirty, Elizabeth's uber-intelligent dog (notwithstanding my doubts, he's probably my favourite character in the book), and Elizabeth's ultra-precocious daughter, Mad, who reads Nabokov and Norman Mailer at age 4 (!). In a way, the whole story is something of a fairy tale.
Which is not to say it's not good. After a while, I decided to just suspend my disbelief and go with the flow.
In the end, I very much enjoyed "Lessons in Chemistry." It's a much more substantial read than the cutesy "chick-lit" cover design would suggest -- some serious messages, and some sad stuff too -- but it was still lots of fun (and laugh-out-loud funny in parts) too. The writing is wonderful. I'll look forward to reading more from Garmus in the future!
Content warnings: sexual assault, pregnancy, sexism/misogyny/pronatalism (i.e., the deeply ingrained attitudes of the time that Elizabeth battles), grief and loss.
I debated over the rating for this one... I didn't QUITE feel like I could give it 5 stars, given the caveats mentioned above -- but at the same time, I really did like it. I settled on 4.5, rounded down to 4 stars on Goodreads
This was Book #10 read to date in 2023 (and Book #4 finished in February), bringing me to 22% of my 2023 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books ahead of schedule. :) You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2023 tagged as "2023 books."
Ha! I just read this book over the weekend. I loved it. It infuriated me, but I laughed too. I really liked the extraordinary parts of the book. (Especially Six-Thirty!) That Elizabeth was extraordinary seemed eminently possible to me. I had many of her thoughts and would have been furious at the slights when I was in my tens and teens. I was just reading about the Harvey Weinstein trials where all this was all happening in the 1990s, and so it was not surprising to me in a book based in the 50s and 60s. She was very single-minded (maybe on the spectrum?) so couldn't express herself in the way feminists did. And the many of the men in her labs etc reminded me of former colleagues a male-dominated company where I worked in the 90s and 2000s. Jealous, threatened, meek and even cowardly. It all seemed VERY realistic to me. lol Ooops! Look, you got me started!!!
ReplyDeleteI was tossing up between four and five stars too, but I rounded up to five. And I completely agree that it's definitely a step above chick lit, with a lot of food for thought, which is EXACTLY how I described it to DH. lol
Oh, this is in my TBR! I thought the cover was "chick lit cutesy" too, so I'm glad it has a little heft behind it, even if some is a bit fairytale-ish. Great review!
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