By Bonnie Garmus.
It's the early 50's and Elizabeth Zott, a born scientific genius, is trying her hardest to get around sexism. Unfortunately, sexism keeps squashing her career. She got raped by her faculty advisor in college and that killed her ability to get a PhD. She's working for Hastings Research in SoCal as a lab tech, but really considers herself to be a chemist and she's passionate about her work. Too bad her boss hates her guts.
She ends up meeting her soulmate, fellow genius and Big Deal Guy Calvin Evans, at Hastings. They partner up and it's beautiful, both at work and living together, but she doesn't want to get married and have kids. Calvin is pretty liberated for his time and place and loves and accepts Elizabeth as she is, for the most part, on an impressive level. They do, however, get a (bomb sniffing!) dog named Six-Thirty.* Unfortunately, the new leash law leads to Calvin's freak death** while he's out running with the dog, and after that, Elizabeth finds out that her birth control failed.
* I frankly didn't comprehend the explanation for the name in this book, nor do I think anyone else would, and cannot explain it to you. I note the TV show version of this makes that make more sense.
** Virtually every review or description I've seen of this book tries to omit this and then just does "one two skip a few" to "oh, btw, Elizabeth has a daughter," but for fuck's sake, it's within the first hundred pages of the book, and I deduced that he died from the descriptions alone anyway. I'm just gonna say it.
Years later, Elizabeth's got a lab in her kitchen, a budding daughter named Madeline named after her feelings at the time of giving birth, a friendship with the neighbor/babysitter Harriet, and she's still struggling at trying to make a living. Out of the blue, a parent at her child's school offers her the world's most random job: hosting an afternoon cooking show on television. Elizabeth likes cooking and considers it chemistry, mind you, but ... this is a stretch, to say the least? She won't dress sexy, she won't make a cocktail, she literally gives away the set dressings and won't read the cue cards. She becomes friends with the guy who recruited her, Walter, but he's also losing his damn mind every day at how she won't behave or get along to go along.
And yet...the show works, because Elizabeth turns it into a science lesson every day. She is polite and respectful of her audience, even if they're "just housewives." She takes them seriously. She gives thoughtful consideration to the questions she's asked, such as about vegetarianism and how something has to give its life for you to survive. It's really pretty beautiful. Possibly the most implausible thing to me is that such an uncooperative--their definition--person gets her own show for awhile, but this book makes it work. She believes her audience is capable and smart, is polite about even what she disagrees with them about, and her audience ends up feeling good.
Even though Calvin's dead, his legacy lives on. Madeline wants to find out more about him, and after meeting a disillusioned minister who used to be Calvin's pen pal, enlists his help in tracking down the awful boys' school that Calvin lived at. Meanwhile, we're told off and on that there was some man that took an interest in Calvin while he was at the school--Calvin presumed that was his biological father and carried a grudge. And likewise, there's some "Parker Foundation" mystery donor who's taken an interest in Elizabeth's work, which evil boss Doctor Donatti twists to his own advantage whenever possible.
I love how this book actually carefully plots everything that might have come off as a stretch to be coincidental. Calvin ends up in the same town as Reverend Wakely because the reverend, a surfer, plugged the excellent weather. Or how we find out Amanda was eating Madeline's lunch because her dad is an absent-minded food packer. Six-Thirty's previous life as a bomb-sniffer comes in handy when he suspects something's funny about a non-happy woman in the audience. I admit this is a wee bit of a stretch, but also I enjoyed it? And the continuing off and on storyline about whoever's privately taken an interest in Calvin and Elizabeth works out really great, and even has a twist to it I did not deduce ahead of time. The ending really made me feel a lot better and was heartwarming. I'll comment more about the ending in the spoiler space.
I also liked how a character who starts out disliking Elizabeth and working against her--Miss Frask--ends up having more in common with Elizabeth than she thinks, and how their relationship improves as the book goes on. That was great.
I note that nobody in the book has a sense of humor (well, Walter tries to make food puns, which falls totally flat with his target), except there's the occasional delightful moment, such as any time Elizabeth has to physically fend off a dude (the second time? I DIED, see spoiler space), and the time she mentions poisonous mushrooms on the show and people think she's cracking a joke but she is serious...I about died there too.
There's also the fact that the dog off and on third-person narrates, which is...odd but works, more or less. (We shall see how this goes on the television show, as the "dog episode" hasn't aired yet at the time of my writing this.)
I really enjoyed reading this and found it very heartening. I'm not a science person--I wish--and normally I might ding it a bit for lack of sense of humor, but it works with these people not to have that going on. (Looking forward to the rest of the TV show too, which seems both similar to this and different in its own ways.) Four stars.
It's the early 50's and Elizabeth Zott, a born scientific genius, is trying her hardest to get around sexism. Unfortunately, sexism keeps squashing her career. She got raped by her faculty advisor in college and that killed her ability to get a PhD. She's working for Hastings Research in SoCal as a lab tech, but really considers herself to be a chemist and she's passionate about her work. Too bad her boss hates her guts.
She ends up meeting her soulmate, fellow genius and Big Deal Guy Calvin Evans, at Hastings. They partner up and it's beautiful, both at work and living together, but she doesn't want to get married and have kids. Calvin is pretty liberated for his time and place and loves and accepts Elizabeth as she is, for the most part, on an impressive level. They do, however, get a (bomb sniffing!) dog named Six-Thirty.* Unfortunately, the new leash law leads to Calvin's freak death** while he's out running with the dog, and after that, Elizabeth finds out that her birth control failed.
* I frankly didn't comprehend the explanation for the name in this book, nor do I think anyone else would, and cannot explain it to you. I note the TV show version of this makes that make more sense.
** Virtually every review or description I've seen of this book tries to omit this and then just does "one two skip a few" to "oh, btw, Elizabeth has a daughter," but for fuck's sake, it's within the first hundred pages of the book, and I deduced that he died from the descriptions alone anyway. I'm just gonna say it.
Years later, Elizabeth's got a lab in her kitchen, a budding daughter named Madeline named after her feelings at the time of giving birth, a friendship with the neighbor/babysitter Harriet, and she's still struggling at trying to make a living. Out of the blue, a parent at her child's school offers her the world's most random job: hosting an afternoon cooking show on television. Elizabeth likes cooking and considers it chemistry, mind you, but ... this is a stretch, to say the least? She won't dress sexy, she won't make a cocktail, she literally gives away the set dressings and won't read the cue cards. She becomes friends with the guy who recruited her, Walter, but he's also losing his damn mind every day at how she won't behave or get along to go along.
And yet...the show works, because Elizabeth turns it into a science lesson every day. She is polite and respectful of her audience, even if they're "just housewives." She takes them seriously. She gives thoughtful consideration to the questions she's asked, such as about vegetarianism and how something has to give its life for you to survive. It's really pretty beautiful. Possibly the most implausible thing to me is that such an uncooperative--their definition--person gets her own show for awhile, but this book makes it work. She believes her audience is capable and smart, is polite about even what she disagrees with them about, and her audience ends up feeling good.
Even though Calvin's dead, his legacy lives on. Madeline wants to find out more about him, and after meeting a disillusioned minister who used to be Calvin's pen pal, enlists his help in tracking down the awful boys' school that Calvin lived at. Meanwhile, we're told off and on that there was some man that took an interest in Calvin while he was at the school--Calvin presumed that was his biological father and carried a grudge. And likewise, there's some "Parker Foundation" mystery donor who's taken an interest in Elizabeth's work, which evil boss Doctor Donatti twists to his own advantage whenever possible.
I love how this book actually carefully plots everything that might have come off as a stretch to be coincidental. Calvin ends up in the same town as Reverend Wakely because the reverend, a surfer, plugged the excellent weather. Or how we find out Amanda was eating Madeline's lunch because her dad is an absent-minded food packer. Six-Thirty's previous life as a bomb-sniffer comes in handy when he suspects something's funny about a non-happy woman in the audience. I admit this is a wee bit of a stretch, but also I enjoyed it? And the continuing off and on storyline about whoever's privately taken an interest in Calvin and Elizabeth works out really great, and even has a twist to it I did not deduce ahead of time. The ending really made me feel a lot better and was heartwarming. I'll comment more about the ending in the spoiler space.
I also liked how a character who starts out disliking Elizabeth and working against her--Miss Frask--ends up having more in common with Elizabeth than she thinks, and how their relationship improves as the book goes on. That was great.
I note that nobody in the book has a sense of humor (well, Walter tries to make food puns, which falls totally flat with his target), except there's the occasional delightful moment, such as any time Elizabeth has to physically fend off a dude (the second time? I DIED, see spoiler space), and the time she mentions poisonous mushrooms on the show and people think she's cracking a joke but she is serious...I about died there too.
There's also the fact that the dog off and on third-person narrates, which is...odd but works, more or less. (We shall see how this goes on the television show, as the "dog episode" hasn't aired yet at the time of my writing this.)
I really enjoyed reading this and found it very heartening. I'm not a science person--I wish--and normally I might ding it a bit for lack of sense of humor, but it works with these people not to have that going on. (Looking forward to the rest of the TV show too, which seems both similar to this and different in its own ways.) Four stars.
Quotes:
- Elizabeth on the science of igniting pistachios: "I will credit my father for two things: he could conjure a spontaneous combustion whenever he needed a convenient sign from God. Boy, did we go through the pistachios."
- Elizabeth's first show day: "At the end of our thirty minutes together, we will have done something worth doing. We will have created something that will not go unnoticed. We will have made supper. And it will matter. Now, let's get started."
- Elizabeth: "I won't perpetuate the myth that women are incompetent. If they cancel me, so be it. I'll do something else."
- Elizabeth: "Today we're going to study three different types of chemical bonds: ionic, covalent, and hydrogen. Why learn about bonds? Because when you do you will grasp the very foundation of life. Plus, your cakes will rise." (Then this leads into a lecture on both science and bonds.)
- Elizabeth finally mentions the sponsored soup...and then says that if you feed enough of it to your loved ones, they will eventually die off and save you tons of time feeding them. "Luckily, there are much faster ways to kill off your loved ones, and mushrooms are an excellent place to start. If it were me, I'd opt for the Amanita phalloides...So if someone dies and there's an inquiry, you can easily play the dumb housewife and plead mistaken mushroom identity." Then she threatens Harriet's awful husband...I DIED.
- Harriet: "Sometimes I ask myself: How is this show so popular?"
- Anonymous audience member: "Sometimes I think that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn't make it past noon."
Spoiler space
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I concur it's pretty lulzy when you realize that Calvin has technically been announced as dead TWICE long before he actually died. First a doctor claimed he died as a baby and then shuffled him off to be adopted, and then a vengeful priest who hated his guts claims Calvin died as a kid when someone wants to see him. Then he ends up on the cover of a magazine, CLEARLY NOT DEAD, and that's hilarious when you find out the rest of this. Calvin is all "these weird people keep writing to me claiming to be my mother, UGH," and yet... surprise, that was actually real in one case!
Seriously, Calvin's mother turning up (I note the guy/presumed father is a business associate of hers) was beautiful, and she's been through the same shit as Elizabeth to some degree, and they all just fit together as a family. Madeline and Amanda's family tree assignment at school--super awkward in both cases--ends up working. Awwwww. I didn't expect this to become a second chance romance--I don't think Elizabeth would ever be with anyone else again anyway--but the familial romance is sweet.
I also enjoyed how the magazine article went--how both the original author of it didn't betray Elizabeth, how his piece was rejected and a souped-up one recounting Elizabeth's scandalous family and past was put in--and how people worked to publish the real piece elsewhere. Also heartwarming.
And when Phil pulls out his penis, and Elizabeth pulls out a 14-inch knife and he keels over...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
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