REVIEW: Lessons in Chemistry (book) by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry is historical women's fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Content warning: sexual assault.

This starts in 1952 and ends in the early 1960s. Elizabeth Zott is a chemist whose primary research interest is abiogenesis. Unfortunately, her lab at Hasting Research Institute never gets much in the way of proper funding, attention, or supplies, and her first encounter with Calvin Evans, the Institute's rockstar chemist, is when she steals a box of beakers from his lab after he mistakes her for a secretary. Calvin eventually tracks her down and the two of them fall in love over discussions about chemistry, although Elizabeth steadfastly refuses to get married.

What follows is the story of how Elizabeth went from that in the 1950s to being a single mother starring in a wildly popular cooking show by 1961.

I read this for a book club. I'd previously seen it pretty much everywhere but hadn't been particularly interested in it. The preview I saw for the TV adaptation was, I think, what clued me in on the cooking and historical aspects. That, combined with the cover art, had me thinking that this would be a light historical romantic comedy featuring a combination of chemistry and cooking. Instead, it's really more historical women's fiction, and the cooking show takes half the book to show up.

Because I thought it was a historical romantic comedy, the on-page sexual assault within the first 20 pages came as a nasty shock (a respected professor forced himself on her when she was a PhD student, which ended with her getting kicked out of her doctoral program). I don't know what I was expecting from the Calvin Evans stuff that followed, but a mostly happy relationship in which they lived together and had lots of sex and stimulating academic discussions wasn't it. 

The addition of Six-Thirty the dog to the story almost made it more cutesy than I could stand. I like dogs, I technically liked Six-Thirty, but then the author made him super-smart, learning hundreds of words from Elizabeth, and wrote sections from his POV. Between him and Elizabeth's equally super-smart daughter, it was a bit much. (FYI, for those needing this animal-related spoiler: the dog does not die).

When the cooking show aspects finally showed up, I enjoyed the overall energy of it but couldn't bring myself to believe in any of it. Supposedly this cooking show somehow became so popular that women were glued to it and taking notes on whatever Elizabeth said. I might have believed it if Elizabeth had been explaining, in layman's terms, how to understand the chemistry behind cooking and use it to improve meals, but what was described sounded more like college lectures. I understand that part of her appeal was supposed to be that she respected her audience's intelligence and refused to dumb anything down or depict herself as the vapid sexy housewife the show's producer expected her to be, but the average woman's kitchen isn't set up like a laboratory and you'll have more luck looking for "salt" on grocery store shelves than "sodium chloride."

While I appreciated where this book ended up, I don't know that I'd have finished it if it hadn't been for my upcoming book club meeting. I just wasn't in the mood.