Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a female chemist in the ’60s who finds herself single, pregnant, and fired from her lab job. She ends up hosting a cooking show while raising her young daughter in order to make ends meet. Throughout her life, she has remained headstrong against setbacks and sexism and, especially through her cooking show, encourages women to believe in themselves and challenge the status quo. I absolutely loved this, but also struggled with it.
Bonnie Garmus is an excellent writer whose creativity knows no bounds with the rich and eccentric world she’s built, but I do think the book could’ve done with a tighter, more concise edit. The reason I struggled with this is because there’s so much excessive detail that it slowly the pace of the entire book down massively. It’s a hard criticism, because everything she included was well-written and only added to the depth of the characters, but it felt difficult to read at times, particularly during the first 30% where I almost DNF’d a few times because of the detailed, seemingly endless pages about rowing. Rowing is a unique activity to include, not something you usually see in media, and it did connect through the story, but my god, it was so dull.
Specifically, there are two issues that stand out to me regarding pacing: The first is that we spend a considerable chunk of the book in the past and, while in the past, we can sometimes go back even further. This was exhausting at times because of how much this happened and how much I wanted to return to action that actually moves the narrative forward, but there wasn’t too much of that, which leads to the second issue. the book is very character-heavy. We seem to get the inner thoughts and sometimes backstories of every character, including the dog’s POV (very enjoyable actually), but again this caused the narrative to often move slowly. And that’s not to say it wasn’t always interesting, or that I didn’t want to learn more about these characters, because I did, but… at what cost? The book lacked focus a lot, trying to do too much at once. It does have a multi-layered plot which comes together nicely at the end.
I wish we learned more about Elizabeth, but her true self is reserved only for herself. Her privacy is understandable as you learn more about her, but even us, as the audience, don’t get to know too much about what’s really going on inside that magnificent brain of hers. Elizabeth is smart, speaks her mind, stands up for herself, and sees the world differently. She questions everything and believes in equality at a time where those thoughts were few and far between. In fact, Elizabeth strikes me as potentially autistic considering all of this, and the way she communicates, reads social cues, and experiences emotions. It’s good representation.
Lessons in Chemistry is one hell of a book. It’s unusual in that I’ve never read a book with a protagonist like this, though some have come close, or a story like this. It’s an exceptional piece of fiction that is well-written, laugh-out-loud funny, has a wide range of lovable and interesting characters, explores a number of widespread themes, and connects everything together with vigour. Although it is quite exhausting that Elizabeth somehow has perfect modern feminist beliefs in the 50s/60s, which seems attributed mostly to her neurodiversity.
It’s not surprising that this has been picked up by Apple TV with Brie Larson starring as Elizabeth Zott. I love Brie and I am super excited to see how the adaptation turns out, because I truly think this was made for the screen and that it will adapt really well. I hope it brings the ’60s aesthetics to life because the book only felt connected to that era through sexism alone.
Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC. Lessons in Chemistry is out on March 31st, 2022.
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