When she’s on the point of leaving the lab for a second time, driven down by her sexist boss, she’s weirdly headhunted by Walter, a TV producer who needs someone to fill an afternoon slot and thinks she’s just the person to teach the nation’s women how to cook. Resourceful to the last, I love that she builds a lab at home out of her kitchen, while pregnant, and then we get lots of details of how she uses that lab as a kitchen.

Not keen to have children, who she knows will mess up your career, Elizabeth ends up with Mad but without the love of her life, Calvin, the also probably neurodiverse scientist who sees her scientific but also romantic value. She can see the sexism in academia but is powerless to change it (this is illustrated by a pretty shocking scene of assault: this is not a cutesy easy read by any means), and she also finds this when she starts to work in a research institute. We follow Elizabeth from school through to university, where her perceived oddness, bluntness and scientific exactness mean she’s a fairly lone soul. Like “The Group”, in fact, this is a bit of a #MeToo book, even though obviously the movement hadn’t been coined when it was set. Add in a kindly neighbour whose life they change and a dog called Six Thirty who has an extensive vocabulary but no way to express it (and is still there at the end, phew!), and you’ve got a lovely cast of characters to follow through the book. But Elizabeth isn’t your run-of-the-mill 1960s housewife (and she’d contend there’s no such thing) and her daughter Mad has benefited from a scientific training which has left her a second-generation uncomfortable genius not fitting in well at school. We open with someone called Elizabeth Zott popping handwritten notes into her daughter’s lunch box some time in the 1960s. I requested and downloaded it back in December last year but I think I’m doing well to review books in the month they’re published I have seen a few reviews already that I’m going to go back to now I’ve collected my own thoughts.Īnd then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing … Another NetGalley book and one with a lot of hype, like Candice Carty-Williams’ “People Person” which I’ll be reviewing in a couple of days, and, like that novel, well worth the hype.

Lessons in chemistry garmus