Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

 

This is good.  So good that I am going to nominate it as one of my all time favourite books, right up there with A Gentleman in Moscow my Amor Townes.

It only took me a few pages to realise that I had found a book in an entirely different league to most other novels I read.  It's the kind of book that brings back the joy of reading through cleverly written prose.  I think that is the key to the whole book, it's clever.

Set in the early 1960s, it perfectly captures the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world.  If you think the workplace is a hard slog now, you really aren't old enough to remember that time when the kind of office politics that was generally accepted then would see people arrested if the same thing happened today.  Women were always to blame, even if the woman was the victim, and any complaints to the management could easily result in the woman being fired.  Senior men were untouchable.

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist.  She is also a highly intelligent woman with clear ideas of her own, although her work is constantly under threat from male colleagues who wish to pass it off as their own.  Nobody likes a clever woman so she is always an outsider with no friends, until the day she comes across Calvin Evans, another highly gifted scientist with a legendary capacity to hold a grudge.

Elizabeth and Calvin fall in love and set up home together, but they do this without a marriage certificate, which immediately marks Elizabeth out as some kind of manipulative schemer trying to get her hands on Calvin's work.  Other women look down on her as they consider that she has thrown herself away and is now to be considered tarnished.  She and Calvin are happy as they are, and when they are adopted by a stray dog, they feel their family is complete.  They call the dog Six-Thirty and he quickly becomes a key character in the book.  If you want to know why he's called Six-Thirty then you really have to read the book. 

I don't want to reveal any more about the plotline because there are things that happen in the first few chapters that you need to come across in the same way you might trip over a kerb.  You need to be shocked by the experience and then recover enough to discover the consequences.  Please don't start reading this book if you are just about to go out somewhere, as driving with an open book on the steering wheel is not a sensible thing to do.

If you read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and if you don't, well it's been nice knowing you.