Lessons in Chemistry: The multi-million-copy bestseller

Product Information

Elizabeth is famous for all the wrong reasons (according to her bosses) while the women who are glued to her show five days a week are seeing all the opportunities they never knew they had, to be more than housewives and mothers. It’s boring, small-minded, and irritating to belittle someone or a group of people you personally disagree with REGARDLESS OF WHAT CAMP YOU’RE IN. I can believe a gifted child could read the words, but I don’t believe any child that young would want to: it’s too far removed from anything they’d understand and care about. In front of a live audience, Elizabeth uses her platform to not only teach women about the chemistry of cooking, but about life being more important than cooking!

Sure there are extremists who deny science but the majority of people and religions do not believe they are mutually exclusive. Why can’t we have a woman who is a brilliant chemist but isn’t naive, socially awkward, and clueless? This incredible novel has EVERYTHING - an unforgettable heroine, wry humour, love, family and bucketloads of optimism and female empowerment. They are dominating almost every field, academics, science, business, innovation, you name it and they're at the top of everything that mattered. Before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement… when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible.Five year old Madeline has almost finished reading Dickens and is now reading The Sound and the Fury. Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in academia, but is forced out before her doctorate because of the misogyny of the times. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. I gave all of my votes to this book, both for the best debut and historical fiction categories, at the Goodreads Choice Awards. On par with Beth Harmon of The Queen's Gambit, Elizabeth Zott swept me away with her intellect, honesty, and unapologetic selfhood.

But several friends assured me I’d enjoy it, and it’s currently 53% at 5* and less than 1% at 1* on GR. The challenges Zott faces, such as being fired for being pregnant and her dire financial circumstances has her becoming an unlikely, reluctant and uncompromising star, dressed in a lab coat, with her popular TV cooking show, Supper at Six, focusing on the chemistry of ingredients and recipes, carrying her subversive and radical agenda of making women question and challenge the cultural misogyny and the limitations placed on their lives. I couldn’t help but laugh and cry with Elizabeth as she struggled to be the best mother and chemist she could possibly be. In a couple of episodes of the programme, I glimpsed what a good implementation of the chemistry conceit might look like (the one with potato skin and glycoalkaloids was good), but too often it's cringe - particularly the extended metaphor around 'bonds' or the book's steadfast conviction that saying 'we had chemistry' is a deep and powerful statement.She also speaks like she is quoting from a textbook about sexism and feminism which does not feel genuine or organic. This fantastic book has been adapted into a streaming series on Apple TV, starring Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott and an outstanding cast crew including Lewis Pullman, Beau Bridges, Ana Naomi King, Kevin Sussman, Thomas Mann, Stephanie Koenig, and Patrick Walker. To be clear, I'm not a pedant, or not too much of one - I don't care if literary fiction for nonspecialists is perfect on every point of chemistry. Instead, Elizabeth teaches women the chemistry involved in cooking and encourages them to achieve greater things. There are a million different avenues of chemistry, and food science is COMPLETELY different than “abiogenesis” which was supposedly her main area of study.

Also working at Hastings is Calvin Evans, a brilliant Noble prize nominee who has his very own massive lab where he can do who knows what and win more accolades. SOMEHOW, she has agreed to host a “cooking show” on TV-though she insists that her show is about Chemistry! It’s inspiring, heartwarming, sad, joyous, intelligent, funny, witty, quirky, original,highly entertaining, life affirmingly brilliant and genius in my opinion! In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman.

Because of the gender roles of that era, her passions and talents for chemistry are going to waste until she ends up with a nightly television show teaching other women how to cook. The first time they met, he thought she was a secretary, and the second time they met, he vomited on her. But essentially, this book is entertaining (sometimes intentionally) but is also completely detached from any actual feminist politic, wilfully ignorant of class and race, hilariously inept vis-a-vis its central conceit, bludgeoningly unsubtle, and has independently rediscovered the fanfiction concept of the 'Mary Sue'. 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.