This book was chosen for my new book club. I’m writing about the book long before we meet. Why? Because I’m impatient. Not because I want to write my thoughts clear and uncluttered by anyone else’s, but because I’m impatient. Also, it’s a library book and I might not be able to reborrow it. I’m trying to watch the series, but I’m finding the romance in it to be far more prominent than in the book.
The book is nicely written. I’ve read some reviews where they don’t like the dog’s point of view, they find that too far fetched. I find it gives it a different kind of balance.
This book highlights how the world is built around men and their work. We’re shown this through two different workplaces. The first is in the science lab.
Elizabeth Zott is a talented and extremely bright person. The only problem to her having a career in science is her living in the early 1960s. It was a very misogynistic time. To be a woman in science at that time was very rare. The book makes this quite clear by only naming one female scientist – Marie Curie. There have been plenty more throughout history, but just about all of them have had their research claimed by men. Four examples I found on a quick google are: Rosalind Franklin who did ground breaking work on DNA and RNA; Lise Meitina with her work on Nuclear Fission; Jocelyn Bell Burnett did fantastic work on Pulsars and; Alice Augusta Ball worked on leprosy.
The second is in the television studio. As a woman, Elizabeth is talked into cooking on TV. This is something she’s very much against, it’s seen as something women do. But she turns the whole thing on its head and does chemistry on TV. I mean, cooking is chemistry, right? She talks about sodium citrate instead of salt and uses other chemistry terms to cook ‘Supper at Six’. She’s able to weather the storms that assail her in the TV studio much better than the storms in the science lab.
One of the messages I loved in the book is how friends become family. When your family is toxic or you just have none then it might be necessary to leave them behind. But you still need people interaction and sometimes your friends can become close enough to be family.
It’s definitely a book I’d recommend.
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