After a bit of a slow start, this book was great. I loved the characters, the timeline and the way the main character Elizabeth pushed the boundaries of a 1950s woman.

I definitely recommend it!

This book took a little while to get into but stick with it. It is worth it! Set in the 1950s when a woman should be in the home, cooking and looking after children; Elizabeth Zott is a scientist. The book follows her career, the discrimination, abuse, her love for Calvin and wonderful daughter and dog. A fantastic read.

I feel very privileged to have been sent an ARC of Lessons In Chemistry to read and have been absolutely blown away by the writing and the story. This was a definite love at first chapter book for me and one which I could scarcely make myself put down! Elizabeth Zott is an absolutely wonderful character – delightfully quirky and completely focused on science. The story is set in the 1950s and 60s when a woman’s place was in the kitchen and tending to the children; definitely not as a top researcher and certainly not holding or voicing any opinions which might contradict a man! Imagine! Well Elizabeth missed the memo and rather than toe the line, she carries on, pursuing her goals and when she hits obstacles she finds a way to get past them and move forward. Life is most certainly frustrating for her, she is denied opportunities and experiences some terrible events, sadly not just at the hands of men.

By chance, Elizabeth meets Calvin and a beautiful relationship and meeting of minds is born. Calvin respects Elizabeth as the scientist she is and champions her and her work. He is considered unusual but because of his academic brilliance he is tolerated by his colleagues. The pair are the subject of gossip and jealous words but this doesn’t really phase them at all. They bring out the best and challenge each other. The chemistry is most definitely there!

I am not going to describe any more of the plot as there is so much and I don’t think you need to know anymore about it – rather get your copy and savour the beautiful story which unfolds. It is a proper rollercoaster of emotion, I laughed, wept, felt anger and joy as I read, alongside dozen of other emotions. I was invested in Elizabeth’s story and I wish it hadn’t had to end (although I imagine Bonnie might not want to spend the rest of her life writing the same character)! Elizabeth is a champion for anyone who is mistreated, mocked or overlooked because they happen to have the audacity to have XX chromosomes or have interests which aren’t “the norm.” She is an inspirational character and I loved her!

Lessons In Chemistry is due to be released in April 2022 and I hope that everyone loves it as much as I do!

Loved this book with its unusual characters and wry humour. Very true depiction of how life was for women in the early 50s, where dual standards and religion were oppressive. Would love a sequel.

I loved this book! At times I was angry, sad, laughing out loud or beaming with joy. The story very cleverly covers the discrimination and abuse that women faced in every aspect of their lives, weaving the up and downs of Elizabeth Zott's career between layers of love, grief and beauty.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for my free e-copy.

I have rounded up to a 4 but would say overall rating for me is 3.5 just down to personal tastes

This story follows Elizabeth who is a chemist and starts working at a lab where she meets a leading scientist Calvin and they start to date. The first half of the book is finding out about the characters and who they were before they met.

I really loved the character six thirty, as well as enjoying a lot of the other characters.

I found the science part of the book interested and learnt a few things

This book was witty with good funny characters and covered a number of topics including cooking, love, loss, religion and science,

What a joy this is, clever, funny, thoughtful and life-affirming. Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, a scientist who is many decades ahead of 1960’s society in terms of equality for women and individual expectations. She unexpectedly and accidentally finds herself presenting a cookery show on daytime television but the chemistry isn’t just in the cooking, it is in her relationship with the love of her life, Calvin, in her remarkable daughter, her amazing dog and her sheer force of personality. Wonderful.

Full review to come on Goodreads and Amazon. Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for a review copy.

Wasn't sure what to expect from this as it's totally different from my usual crime/thriller fare BUT! I don’t think anything I can say will do this book justice. I love it from beginning to end. Super witty and just generally fabulous.

Elizabeth Zott is a woman with a brilliant mind but she is also a woman living in the 1960s and no one is listening to her. No one, that is, until Calvin Evans stumbles into her life. Calvin is a fellow scientist and happens to be her soulmate. At last someone acknowledges her mind and her work, but he seems to be her only supporter.

Usually it takes me a day or so to review a book. I finished this one ten minutes ago and I have to talk about it! My prediction for what it’s worth - this will be a huge best seller.

Bonnie Garmus is a genius writer. She has created a cast of superb characters - the main one being, the Scientist, Elizabeth Zott.

It’s the early 1960s and Elizabeth, despite her brilliant mind, is getting nowhere in her attempts to complete her research due to the misogynistic attitudes of the male world of Science. She is sick and tired of women being treated as inferior to men, stuck at home and belittled. Elizabeth decides to take chemistry, via a cookery programme, into the mainstream and into women’s homes every afternoon. But it’s not just chemistry she is promoting. She is promoting change: change in women’s opinions of their own worth and change in the way men and society in general view them.

Bonnie Garmus made me laugh and cry during the telling of Elizabeth’s story. At times I wanted to stand up and cheer and other times I wanted to sit down and cry. The sign of a good book for me is when it grabs my emotions and loses me within it. Lessons in Chemistry is one of those books. I absolutely LOVED it.

Oh and, yes, my favourite character is Six-thirty, the dog, who has his own place in the book as a narrator. You have to read it to appreciate it. Funny, sad, hopeful and challenging - this is a simply fabulous read.

Thankyou for giving me the chance to read in advance. Funny charming and literally laugh out loud. Would highly recommend

Amazing, in it’s storyline, characters and understanding of feminist issues. I would strongly advise any young woman to read this for it’s social context and for everyone to remind us of past and current issues. All of this is wrapped up in a storyline and writing style that cannot be bettered and I read a lot! It is impossible to believe that this is Bonnie’s first book, she writes with such accomplishment that I found it difficult to realise that she had not been writing successful novels for years. In fact as I had not noticed that it was a debut novel when I finished reading I immediately went on Amazon to actually buy ( almost unheard of ) her other novels only to find none...this is a debut novel!.?! Bonnie’s novel has enhanced my holiday in Cornwall recently, although my husband did have to listen to me either crying, laughing or reading aloud extracts.
Thank you very much to Netgalley, published and most importantly the author for the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

Elizabeth Zott's daughter, Mad, knows not to let on that she can read at kindergarten and that her dog, six thirty has a vocabulary of over 600 words she knows her mother is depressed but can't work out how to change things. Elizabeth is fighting a losing battle to be taken seriously as the only female scientist at the Hastings Research Institute and when the opportunity comes along to present a cooking show in her own unique style, she takes it. The pay and hours are better and she has a daughter to support.
I must say that as a scientist myself I recognise the themes in this book, I may not have started work in the 60's but twenty years later the attitudes described still echoed in the work environment and in fact to this day if you look at the makeup in research institutes and universities the representation of women falls from 50% to a very low number as you move up the ranks. I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth's journey despite it being a bittersweet story. Excellent.

Enjoyed this book so much! Unusual for me to find one that I don't want to put down, but the combination of writing style and plot rendered it irresistible. I genuinely cared about what might happen next, and what the future would hold for the characters. Excellent.

I loved “lessons in chemistry” . I lurched from being enraged at Elizabeth’s treatment, to amusement, frustration, sadness. It is a brilliant read. Very entertaining and hard to believe it is a debut novel. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review.

It's early February. This is my 12th book of 2022 and it's the first to prise five stars from me, and I offer them without reservation, excuse or much in the way of explanation. It's simply a fantastic book filled with marvellous, quirky people that you'd love to have in your life.

Elizabeth Zott is an outstanding character, a woman decades ahead of her time who chooses to live her life by her own rules and to refuse to conform. Seeing the world through her filter of chemistry, she sets out to show that women aren't just there to type the memos and make the coffee and to bring up those she loves - her daughter, Mad and her dog, SixThirty to always be the most that they can be.

There's so much prejudice in this book but also so much hope. It's a great book about living your life and making your own family out of those you choose rather than those you share DNA with.

Funny, heart-warming, and very different to anything I've read in a long time. Well done to Bonnie Gamus for bringing this fantastic scientist to life.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers. Here, take my first 5-star review and know it's not something I give out lightly.

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, 2022)

Meet Elizabeth Zott. She is a brilliant chemist, stifled by the patriarchal attitudes of the 1950s and the men in her field. The only exception is Calvin Evans, the Nobel Prize nominated wunderkind of their laboratory, who falls for her instantly.
Fast-forward a few years: Elizabeth, now a single mother, is forced to take a job as the host of a cooking show on local TV. Despite the demands of her bosses, Elizabeth disrupts the status quo, and empowers a generation of American women to take pride in their intelligence and to take back their power.

Okay, time for an unpopular opinion. I was really excited for this book, there’s a lot of positive buzz for it on Booksta. I really just couldn’t get into it, and at points considered not finishing it.

Bonnie Garmus can write with great humour and warmth, and her debut novel is really readable. However, all the characters in this book felt very one-dimensional to me; we spend so much time with the impermeable Elizabeth Zott, and never truly get to know her. There is a sprawling cast of characters who all seem a bit too straightforward in their intentions, good and evil. The most believable character is Six Thirty, the genius dog, whose asides reveal more about the characters than any of the humans. Everything felt too neatly resolved, and some moments worth further exploration are brushed over.

There is really massive buzz about this book, and I have no doubt it will be a hit. It’s been picked up by Apple TV, for a series starring Brie Larson. I think it’ll lend itself well to a series, where we can spend a little more time with the characters (and I can’t wait to see the gorgeous 60’s aesthetic).

Sadly it’s ⭐️⭐️⭐️ from me!

Thank you to @netgalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday for the ARC!

Such a fabulous, funny and thought-provoking book! I couldn't put it down and it had me laughing out loud one minute and aching with Elizabeth's pain the next. Set in the 50s and 60s the book is primarily about how women were regarded as little more than servants and sex objects, showing this through Elizabeth's unrecognised brilliance as a chemist and her refusal to give in to her detractors. When she and Nobel-prize-nominated Calvin meet and fall in love their affair, and Elizabeth's pregnancy, spark envy and malice amongst their colleagues and when Elizabeth is left alone with her illegitimate child she loses her job as a chemist and is headed toward penury.

This is where, despite Elizabeth's pain, the book becomes incredibly amusing as Elizabeth takes a job as a TV cook which she insists is a job showing cooking through chemistry. The show is an instant hit with women viewers who identify with Elizabeth's fight against mysogyny.

There's a wonderful cast of characters including daughter Mad, dog Six-Thirty, Harriet the neighbour, Mad's truly obnoxious teacher Mrs Mudford and Miss Frask from Personnel. The pathos and the humour are beautifully balanced and I'm sure I've learned more about chemistry than I ever did at school... Highly recommended!

I am utterly astonished that this is a debut novel because it is absolute perfection and I don’t know how author Bonnie Garmus can top it, but I solemnly swear to buy everything she ever writes. It may only be February but this will be the best book I read all year. In fact it is my book of the decade.

I won’t recite the plot like so many book reviews do but I will tell you that the character of Elizabeth Zott is so hypnotically readable that I even noticed I was picking up some of her personality traits. This woman could have been a world leader had she not been born in the wrong decade. Set in the 50s and early 60s, Lessons in Chemistry is the story of a highly intelligent, uncompromising female scientist at a time when the world wanted meek housewives who knew their place. She is treated appallingly by the patriarchal society she lives in, yet refuses to sink.

Elizabeth Zott is one of the most fascinating, well-rounded figures I have ever read about. She is humourless but not joyless, serious, but passionate. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly yet is loving and loyal to those who are important to her. She empowers other women. She is highly intelligent, far more so than the men surrounding her, and raises her daughter without fear of anything.

Now this was a surprise: her dog, Six Thirty, narrates some of this book. It works brilliantly and I loved him so much. He is a character rather than an accessory and his relationship to Elizabeth was tender and moving. She treats him as an intelligent being and he repays her with true love and loyalty.

Bonnie Garmus has quietly written a masterpiece and I will be telling everyone I know to read it.

Elizabeth lives in 1960s America, a single mother, and struggles to maintain her career in chemistry against society's expectations of what a women should be and do. She ends up as a TV chef but treating recipes like chemistry experiments. You'll fall in love with her character. A great book about a woman who pushes to go her own way in a man's world.