Guest review by Penny Dolan: LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

                            

  

"A delight ... made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lessons in Chemistry did not look like a book I’d choose. For a start, the dust jacket image offers half a woman, in a dated high-heeled stance, carrying a colour television showing an American cookery programme. There are also quantities of – to me - annoying quotes. Nigella Lawson, Nina Stebbe, Rachel Joyce . . . However, as the novel was an important birthday gift, I sighed and opened up the pages.

What a pleasure! Almost immediately, I was swept away by the confident voice and dark wit of the writing. This highly enjoyable novel is – give or take some anguish - such an uplifting read that I forgot my crossness about those quotes.

Set in early 60’s America, Lessons in Chemistry is an almost-fairy-tale. The central character is Elizabeth Zott, misfit and heroine, who shines brightly and positively despite all the sharp injustices, pains, losses and her lack of small talk. As a reader, my heart hurt at her troubles and I rejoiced in her every forward step. (An aside: Garmus did not let me down.)

Not long after the start of the book, the admirable Zott becomes the host on Supper at Six, a daily afternoon TV show aimed at “ordinary housewives”. Dressed in her lab coat, with her notebook, pencil and kitchen knives, Zott explains the science behind the cooking process. Alongside, she tells her audience that they are far more than “ordinary”. She treats the women as intelligent people, reminding them of their own hopes and dreams and insisting, during their busy days, of the importance of making a moment just for themselves. Zott’s show, expected to fail, becomes a success.

However, Garmus, introducing the back story, makes it clear that this is not success to the highly-intelligent Zott, whose dreams have already been broken. She does not see herself as a cook. Zott is and always has been a scientist, ready to pursue a particular theory. Once, for a short pivotal time, such a passion was possible but tragedy struck. Now Zott’s scientific career has become what it always had been, one of picking herself up from one bitter disappointment to another.

Garmus makes clear that the academic establishment has, so far, considered Zott – both her brains and her gender - as challenges to the scientific and social norms of the time. She has been sexually abused, accused of being a slut and denied opportunities. Take this small example. Re-applying for a job at the hateful Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth Zott finds she has been demoted to the role of lab technician. Worse, the smirking boss and “boys” present her with a new lab-coat, embroidered with her initials. E.Z. First time around, being English, I read those letters without American pronounciation. The next time, I understood why she was so upset. You try.

Yet Zott, despite everything, builds a lab in her own home, organises her life and responsibilities as best she can, takes cash in hand from the same staff that dismissed her, and persists. How one longs for her success! But without giving away any spoilers, the plot of Lessons in Chemistry is about much more than nasty bullying or the fame that comes from a tv show.

Yes, there is sadness in the book: the ploys of opportunistic bosses, greedy clerics and the harm of judgemental gossips. Yes, there are moments when my heart cried out for stoical, misunderstood Zott. But yes, there are also moments of delight, humour, affection and quietly happy coincidences. As the story progresses, the lonely Zott attracts a cast of misfit neighbours and self-effacing friends who find themselves standing by and helping her, while others, eventually and unexpectedly, do what is right.

There are three wonderful main characters who are most definitely on Zott’s side: Madeleine, a little girl with a passion for libraries and an imaginative approach to family trees; Six-Thirty, a loving, loyal dog with a vocabulary of over three hundred words and, of course, Calvin Evans, champion rower, scientific genius, grudge-holder and soul mate.

Moreover, between all the conflicts, Bonnie Garmus has laced Lessons in Chemistry with a satisfyingly, mysterious storyline involving mislaid documents, mistaken identities and enigmatic strangers. I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days.

When you find this book, do - if possible - glance at the hard cover beneath the dust jacket. No annoying images, no quotes, almost no words. Simply, unadorned, a pattern made from the Periodic Table. Possibly with poisons.

* * * * * * * * * *

Extract: To the horror of the TV producer, Zott has emptied her studio set of a quantity of homely decorations, clearing her "kitchen" surfaces so they are ready for work. Meanwhile, advertisers are insisting - again - that she shows their products to the audience.

“Hello viewers,” Elizabeth said, “See this?” She held the can of soup close to the camera. “It’s a real time saver."

From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup!

“That’s because it’s full of chemicals,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and eventually they’ll die off, saving you tons of time because you won’t have to feed them any more.”

Lessons in Chemistry is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Penny:

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier

"Chevalier's ability to present historical events as if they're unfolding in front of us gives startling impact to the characters' bafflement at the 'monster' fossils Mary finds, seen through the lens of nineteenth-century religious belief..."

I've recently enjoyed Tracy Chevalier's latest novel, At the Edge of the Orchard, set in nineteenth-century Ohio and California, and now can't think why I hadn't read this one sooner, as its subject - Mary Anning and her fossil discoveries in the early 19th century - is so obviously appealing.

Chevalier's hallmark is to make historical settings and people seem fresh and immediate; she never lets research overload the story or weigh it down with archaic diction. We're soon immersed in the daily and domestic lives of the two first-person narrators. Within pages, we're at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, out on the beach, aware of the incoming tide and the dangers of landslips, eyes peeled for belemnites and the ammonites believed at that time to be coiled snakes.

Both alternating viewpoints are based on historic figures: Elizabeth Philpot, newcomer to Lyme Regis, unmarried in a household of women, finding a keen interest in fossil-hunting; and Mary Anning herself, only ten when the novel begins, uneducated and self-taught, whose regular finds of 'curios' on the beach help her family eke out a living, especially after the death of her father. In fact it's Mary's brother Joe who makes the first astonishing find: a fossilised creature believed at first to be a crocodile but later named ichthyosaurus. 

Despite the difference in class and an age gap of twenty years, a close association and friendship builds between these two women - Elizabeth at first learning from Mary, later warning her of the risks of a love affair with a man who will never marry her, and more than once taking decisive action to ensure that Mary is given credit for her remarkable discoveries. A serious quarrel between them causes a lasting rift, yet this relationship is the most important in the novel, and through it Chevalier shows us the difficulties for women engaged in science in the early nineteenth-century - how easily their achievements can be purloined by men, and their contributions dismissed as insignificant. The alternating narratives show us the passionate, impulsive yet practical Mary, who believes that she owes her special gift to her survival of a lightning strike as a baby, counterbalanced by the more worldly and rational Elizabeth, who tries to help the Annings through the ups and downs of financial hardship and whose links with London take her into male-dominated institutions such as the Geological Society.

Chevalier's ability to present historical events as if they're unfolding in front of us gives startling impact to the characters' bafflement at the 'monster' fossils Mary finds, seen through the lens of nineteenth-century religious belief. If they are God's creatures, why are none like them alive today? The concept of extinction barely exists - were these animals, then, among those on Noah's Ark, Mary asks at one point? A clergyman, faced with Mary's reasonable question that since God made the land before the animals, how could fossils be embedded in rocks, replies that God must have placed the fossils there to test our faith. The novel places us at the dawn of understanding the true age of the Earth, then believed - according to Bishop Ussher's calculations - to have been a mere 6,000 years old. (Indeed, Bishop Ussher concluded that Heaven and Earth were created on the night preceding the 23rd October 4004 BC: 'I had always wondered at his precision,' Elizabeth reflects.) Mary Anning's discoveries of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs were significant in shaping evolutionary theory - leading to ideas which revolutionised our view of the human population just as surely as the discovery that the sun, rather than the Earth, is the centre of our universe.

Such big ideas could have overwhelmed the novel in hands less skilled than Chevalier's. We're left with the picture shown on the rather beautiful cover: a headstrong, unconventional girl and her older, more cautious friend, a windswept beach, a search that may prove fruitless or may unlock more of Earth's secrets.

Both Mary and Elizabeth are given recurring motifs. Mary's is the lightning, which she believes courses through her body at moments of revelation, love and - on one occasion - sexual ecstasy. Elizabeth's is her habit of defining people according to which feature they 'lead by'. Mary Anning leads with her eyes; her sister Margaret leads with her hands. Meeting the attractive but possibly manipulative Captain Birch, Elizabeth comments: 'I have never trusted a man who leads with his hair. Only a vain, overconfident man does that.'

I don't know who Tracy Chevalier had in mind when she wrote that phrase. But I know who I'm thinking of now.

Remarkable Creatures is published by Harper Collins.