Lessons in Chemistry: The multi-million-copy bestseller

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Lessons in Chemistry is a vibrant and original story of hope and staying true to yourself. Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and brimming with life and generosity and courage." - Rachel Joyce

I sometimes have a problem when dogs are anthropomorphized. But it didn’t bother me here, even when his thoughts were included. I only wish my dog understood 900 words. I don’t think anything I can say will do this book justice. I love it from beginning to end and it will most certainly be in my top five reads of 2021. We fast-forward to see Elizabeth building a new life, raising her four-year-old, extra-smart, one-of-a-kind, sweetest girl named Mad Zott, helping their dog Six-Thirty improve his vocabulary skills, and most importantly, she's a TV star now! She teaches women to use chemistry not only in their kitchen but in their entire life to embrace change and challenges. She hosts the most eccentric cooking show called "Supper at Six." Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

I’m over quirky characters who behave as if they are on the spectrum. Why can’t we have a woman who is a brilliant chemist but isn’t naive, socially awkward, and clueless? Except when she’s not, usually in time to deliver another monologue. Elizabeth Zott: How can I express my feelings about this character? She's so unique, different, extraordinary, visionary, extremely quirky, odd, straightforward, honest, a real feminist, intelligent, intellectual, fighter, survivor, and a brilliant scientist who is brave enough to fight for her rights and her loved ones against mansplaining, inequality, abuse, and humiliation!

I'm a staunch feminist and I agreed and/or recognised most issues, still, I just found this novel annoying, heavy-handed, and way too on the nose.The dog, Six-Thirty, is even more advanced (hence, I’ve shelved this as magical-realism). I know dogs are clever and empathetic, but paragraphs of his profound and knowledgeable philosophising on often abstract concepts were just silly. He even had opinions on Proust! For something that is decribed as being hilarious, there was an awful lot of dark subject matter. While I understand that humour can be found in dark places etc, this wasn't it. The tone of the book was all over the place, like it didn't know what it wanted to be. It thought it was smarter and funnier than it was. I genuinely struggle to see what was so hilarious, I was mildly amused in some instances at most. Lessons in Chemistry is such a powerful book without being preachy, and I greatly look forward to reading this one again.

So this book centres on Elizabeth Zott, an impossibly intelligent woman with perfect 21st-century politics (also she's beautiful but she doesn't, like, care about that) who's been inexplicably plopped into a 1950s setting. She's a self-taught chemist, working on abiogenesis, which the book appears to think can low-key disprove religion (this book has a very weird relationship to religion - edgelord atheist vibes), but because it's the 1950s, she's forced out of her doctoral programme and undervalued at work. She strikes up a relationship with a powerful chemist who adores her, but he dies in an accident, leaving her unwed, pregnant and fired, doing consultation work so the men at her old lab can actually understand their results. Undeterred, she builds a lab at home, and ends up getting hired to a local cooking programme, which she converts into a serious scientific cooking programme that the housewives of America love because She Treats Them Like Adults.Elizabeth Zott has a very strong sense of self, and she doesn't allow people to talk her into things. There's lots of self-conscious quirk, some of which fits the period more plausibly than others, and much of it is based on stereotypes played for laughs, rather than realism. Like Elizabeth, my 20-something is a scientist at heart, with a passion for cooking. They've extended their skills beyond anything I've taught them by structured research and experimentation around the chemical reactions involved. But even they wouldn't call salt “sodium chloride” (except perhaps as a one-off joke), let alone vinegar by... whatever the chemical name was Elizabeth used on her TV show. I found this mostly boring, to be honest. The book zips from really dark subjects like rape and abuse to light somewhat farcical subjects like teaching a dog English or Elizabeth becoming an amazing rower by studying physics (women can smart their way into being better than six foot athletic men at everything because saying they can't is sexist, yo)... and I struggled to find any of it compelling. the MC’s daughter is a genius who knew the periodic table as a preschooler and reads the Sound and the Fury at age 8. Of course she is. Very relatable. Fast forward and Elizabeth has a daughter named Madeline, Mad for short. Elizabeth was trying to work as a scientist at a lab in her home. She is a consultant for scientists who need and want her help, but it’s not enough to provide for herself and her daughter.