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LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY

by Bonnie Garmus ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022

A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.

Two chemists with major chemistry, a dog with a big vocabulary, and a popular cooking show are among the elements of this unusual compound.

At the dawn of the 1960s, Elizabeth Zott finds herself in an unexpected position. She's the star of a television program called Supper at Six that has taken American housewives by storm, but it's certainly not what the crass station head envisions: “ 'Meaningful?' Phil snapped. 'What are you? Amish? As for nutritious: no. You’re killing the show before it even gets started. Look, Walter, it’s easy. Tight dresses, suggestive movements...then there’s the cocktail she mixes at the end of every show.' ” Elizabeth is a chemist, recently forced to leave the lab where she was doing important research due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Now she's reduced to explaining things like when to put the steak in the pan. "Be sure and wait until the butter foams. Foam indicates that the butter’s water content has boiled away. This is critical. Because now the steak can cook in lipids rather than absorb H2O.” If ever a woman was capable of running her own life, it's Elizabeth. But because it's the 1950s, then the '60s, men have their sweaty paws all over both her successes and failures. On the plus side, there's Calvin Evans, world-famous chemist, love of her life, and father of her child; also Walter Pine, her friend who works in television; and a journalist who at least tries to do the right thing. At the other pole is a writhing pile of sexists, liars, rapists, dopes, and arrogant assholes. This is the kind of book that has a long-buried secret at a corrupt orphanage with a mysterious benefactor as well as an extremely intelligent dog named Six-Thirty, recently retired from the military. ("Not only could he never seem to sniff out the bomb in time, but he also had to endure the praise heaped upon the smug German shepherds who always did.") Garmus' energetic debut also features an invigorating subplot about rowing.

Pub Date: April 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-385-54734-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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‘GMA’ Picks ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ for Book Club

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Fiction About Jobs? It’s Rarer Than You Think

PERSPECTIVES

Barnes & Noble Names Top 10 Books of 2022

THE BLUE HOUR

by Paula Hawkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2024

This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.

The discovery that a revered artist’s sculpture contains a human bone sets off scandal and violence.

Art historian James Becker has what seems like a sweet deal. He’s the curator of the collection of the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family: Sebastian, Becker’s best friend, and his bitter mother, Lady Emmeline. Becker’s wife, Helena, was Sebastian’s fiancee first, but they’re all very civilized about it and happily awaiting the birth of her baby. The centerpiece of the Fairburn collection is works by the late Vanessa Chapman, an artist about whom Becker wrote his thesis, and with whom he is somewhat obsessed. Partly, it’s because of her great talent, but she was also a glamorous figure, a beauty who, as she became successful, sequestered herself on an isolated Scottish tidal island called Eris. She had a dark side—lots of stormy relationships, plus a philandering mooch of a husband who vanished without a trace a few decades ago. Her reputation, though, has risen after her death—so much so that the Fairburn has loaned some of her works to the Tate Modern. That’s where a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. The scientist is sure the bone is human, and soon Becker finds himself scrambling to prevent scandal. Vanessa willed her works and papers to the foundation, but some of them are still on Eris, guarded by her longtime friend Grace Haswell. A retired doctor, Grace lived with Vanessa off and on over the years and nursed her through her fatal cancer. It was a surprise when Vanessa left her estate not to Grace but to Douglas Lennox, Emmeline’s husband and Sebastian’s father. Douglas was Vanessa’s gallerist and lover, but the two had a nasty falling-out. Sebastian is so frustrated by Grace’s refusal to turn over all of the bequest that he’s ready to sue her, but Becker believes he can negotiate, so off to the the island he goes. He finds far more treachery and shocking secrets than he expected, past and present alike. Hawkins keeps her cast tight, her wild setting ominous, and her plot moving fast.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024

ISBN: 9780063396524

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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BOOK REVIEW

by Paula Hawkins

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Sally Rooney

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Review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is a dazzling story about one woman’s fight against misogyny.

I try to read many of the celebrity book club picks and after finishing True Biz by Sara Novic (Reese’s April Book Club Pick), I decided to try Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (GMA April Book Club Pick). I’ve seen so many glowing reviews for the novel and my expectations were sky high. And it delivered. I quite enjoyed it and I thought the ending is extremely satisfying.

But I will say it did take me a bit to get into the story. Longer than I expected. I actually felt the story really took off when the TV cooking show part began.

What’s the Story About

Lessons in Chemistry follows Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show.

Elizabeth has dealt with it all. Plenty of misogyny and people doubting her skills. All she wants to do is work on her scientific research but the patriarchy keeps standing in her way. Everything changes for Elizabeth when the most unlikely event happens—she falls in love with a fellow scientist, Calvin.

But as life is unpredictable, Elizabeth eventually finds herself as a single mother and without a job. Through an extraordinary set of events, she ends up becoming the host of a TV cooking show. And while she takes cooking very seriously, she also embarks plenty of lessons to her mostly female audience.

Elizabeth’s Story

Elizabeth is such an engaging protagonist. I don’t think I’ve ever read one quite like her before. She’s extremely serious and to the point. She’s very intelligent and tired of dealing with other people’s bad behavior. Elizabeth shows her vulnerable side only on rare occasions.

While the story is quirky and the writing is clever and humorous at parts, there are some serious topics addressed. Including a couple scenes that deserve a trigger warning, which I did not anticipate. I do think the cover, while cute, is a bit misleading in some ways.

I liked reading about Elizabeth’s journey and what she is able to overcome is inspiring. However, I would have liked to have seen more scenes with her daughter. And I do think it took too long to arrive at the TV show component.

I will say, the supporting cast is outstanding—probably one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Supper at Six

You’ll be entertained by how Elizabeth got herself a cooking show! And she does not want to follow any direction from her producer, Walter. She takes matters in her own hands and combines her love and knowledge of chemistry to teach her audience how to cook and much more. Each episode serves as a life lesson of some sorts.

I felt this part was so vivid that it almost felt like it was a real show! I can’t only imagine the impact if a show like this had existed in the ’60s.

All in all, I really liked the novel. Not a perfect execution but I do think it’s a unique and very entertaining story.

For book clubs, check out my discussion questions here .

Beneath Its Pink Cover, ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ Offers a Story About Power

The best-selling debut author Bonnie Garmus created Elizabeth Zott, a chemist battling a sexist 1950s establishment, as the role model she craved — and found that readers wanted the same.

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By Sadie Stein

There’s a scene early on in Bonnie Garmus’s novel “Lessons in Chemistry” in which Elizabeth Zott, a redoubtable chemist thwarted at every turn by a hidebound 1950s establishment, is given career advice by a male colleague: “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.” Zott, for her part, “didn’t like the notion that systems had to be outsmarted. Why couldn’t they just be smart in the first place?”

The ascent of “Lessons in Chemistry” — a book whose success is the stuff publishing dreams are made of — begs the same question.

The United States edition, with its bubble gum pink cover bearing a stylized woman’s face peering over a pair of cat-eye sunglasses, reads as overtly feminine, a light beach read for a day off. One can, of course, read any number of things at the beach. But some readers, at least, have been surprised to open it and find the story of Zott, a brilliant woman whose fetching chignon is secured by a sharp No. 2 pencil also intended to ward off sexual assault.

Although she’s not interested in celebrity, Zott becomes the face of a cooking show through which she educates her viewers in chemistry, self-worth and agency. Ultimately, she triumphs through hard work and pragmatism, and by using the media available to women of her era to new ends. It is hard not to read “Lessons in Chemistry” and wonder if Zott’s creator has achieved something similarly subversive, offering readers more substance than some, at least, expected — and changing their lives in the process.

Aiming the novel at a female readership is “a bit pigeonholing,” said James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble. But ultimately, he added, “the book has dominated the cover.”

In its brief life — “Lessons in Chemistry” was released in April, in the United States and Britain, by Doubleday — the book has become an international success, with six months on best seller lists in the United States and rights sold in 40 countries. Last week it was named Barnes & Noble’s book of the year, and this week, one of Amazon’s top 20 books of the year. There is a series in production on Apple TV+, starring and executive-produced by Brie Larson. It is on track to be the best-selling debut novel of 2022.

The dissonance between the implicit promise of the book’s American cover and its contents — besides its serious themes, the book contains a good deal of rowing, to say nothing of the sections narrated by the family dog, Six-Thirty — has meant Garmus has, at times, had to answer questions from readers. The covers in other markets (primary colors in Britain, sober in Germany, surreal in Estonia) paint a different picture.

Despite its candy shell, the book is “not sweet,” said the elegant and soft-spoken Garmus, 65, in an interview during a whirlwind November trip to New York from London, where she lives with her husband.

She has received “hate mail” from a few indignant readers who expected something different, she recalled, laughing. “They were like, ‘You’re the worst romance novelist ever!’”

On its face, “Lessons in Chemistry” might look like an overnight success story: A career copywriter experiences some “garden variety misogyny” one day at work, takes her anger out on the page and catches the eye of an agent, who offers representation on the strength of three chapters. The book goes to auction; bidding wars ensue; the novel comes out and surpasses expectations.

“I sent it out on a Tuesday,” Garmus’s agent in Britain, Felicity Blunt, said of the manuscript, “and by Wednesday morning I was getting emails that were coming in faster, faster, faster.” Blunt had to forbid Garmus from stress-exercising on her rowing machine — a habit the author shares with her main character — so that she could be reached.

In fact, it all took a great deal of work. “Part of the reality behind the myth of an overnight success,” said Garmus’s American agent, Jennifer Joel, “is that most people have actually been toiling, laboriously and diligently, in an unseen way, for years.”

Garmus had endured nearly 100 rejections of prior projects. Blunt, who worked with Garmus to massage the manuscript and gave the title a crucial tweak — it was originally called “Introduction to Chemistry” — to broaden its reach, credits Garmus’s many years as a copywriter for the precision of her prose and her ability to work collaboratively.

“She had gone over each of those lines,” Blunt said, “but you couldn’t see the cracks because it hadn’t been overworked.”

Many of those involved in the process, from agents to her editor, Lee Boudreaux, to the booksellers who’ve enthusiastically hand-sold copies across the country, expressed a similar reaction: They immediately wanted to share the book with people they knew. For Boudreaux, it was with her mother-in-law; for Daunt, the Barnes & Noble chief executive, it was with his daughters. “So many people say, ‘I gave it to my mother, my husband, my children’ — it’s a book for everyone,” said Todd Doughty, senior vice president of publicity and communications at Knopf Doubleday.

Garmus spent the bulk of her childhood in Riverside, Calif., before her father’s work as an entomologist took the family overseas. Before becoming a homemaker, her mother had been a nurse. “I hadn’t really appreciated how many limits had been imposed on that generation until I started doing the research,” Garmus said, describing how she became aware of what it meant to women, “giving up your career, and then being called average all the time.”

Garmus is adamant that the uncompromising Zott — glamorous, tough, relentlessly logical — is not based on any one person, but said that the book is something of “a love letter to scientists and the scientific brain.” She never wanted to be a scientist herself, she said, but worked for a few years at a science textbook company, and “admired the fact that they were going after this world that we hadn’t yet understood.” Garmus’s husband is a scientist, as well.

The title also communicates the author’s genuine enthusiasm for pedagogy. “We should treat science education like we do reading,” she said, and “have kids experimenting and failing at an early age and getting used to getting past failure.”

For this novel, Garmus learned chemistry from a 1950s text written several years before the novel’s setting, to avoid anachronisms. “Bonnie has such integrity,” Blunt said, “and absolute discipline and very high standards. She’s happy to own that. She’s right, without embarrassment.”

While there’s an element of luck to any such commercial triumph, the timing seems to have been crucial to this one. Whether it’s the book’s characters, its messaging or the escape to a time when the feminist discussion was less fraught, readers are hungry for it.

“Look, there have been a lot of hard things about our lives these past couple of years,” Joel said. “And the little bit of escapism that comes from walking around in somebody else’s shoes for a little while and seeing them rise and overcome and sort of get justice and find happiness … Perhaps we could use more of it.”

As Garmus puts it, she wrote the character she needed. “I felt like I was writing my own role model, and so she came easily.”

Based on the letters Garmus receives, “Lessons in Chemistry” has struck a chord with a wide swath of readers, although the American cover might have scared off a few men. Garmus recalls talking to an all-male book group whose members were initially dissuaded by the novel’s Jordan-almond palette.

“But as I’m fond of saying,” Garmus said, “the book isn’t anti-men, it’s anti-sexism.”

The irony, as some readers have pointed out to Garmus, is that Zott would have hated being portrayed looking coyly flirtatious. Ultimately, Garmus said, “I think you have to listen to your publisher, and they have a lot of experience.”

“Lessons in Chemistry” is a book that defies easy categorization and which, depending on which of its suitors had won, or which direction the winning house had decided to take, might have gone a number of ways. For the same reason, it appeals to a range of readers. And whether because of the cover or in spite of it, the book hit its mark; sales are off the charts. Even the kind of rowing machine Zott uses has seen a spike in sales. And the book is now being added to syllabuses: One high-school teacher, says Garmus, is making her students read “Lessons in Chemistry” for a class on the American dream.

What surprised Garmus the most about the book’s success, she said, has been readers’ reports of how “Lessons in Chemistry” spurred them to change their lives.

“People have quit their jobs and gone back to school or people have gotten divorced because they recognize themselves,” Garmus said. “Sometimes I want to say, ‘You know it’s fiction, right?’ But on the other hand, it was what I was trying to get across. You can really do what you need to do. You just have to dig in really hard and not expect it to be very easy.”

Zott is a catalyst, she adds. “She’s actively breaking and creating new bonds. And that is chemistry at its most basic.” And the U.S. paperback’s cover, she said, will “look different.”

An earlier version of this article misstated Bonnie Garmus’s age. She is 65, not 58. Also, the original title of the book was “Introduction to Chemistry,” not “Chemistry Lessons.”

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of an actor; she is Brie Larson, not Larsen. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

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clock This article was published more than 2 years ago

At age 64, debut novelist Bonnie Garmus makes the case for experience

Garmus’s novel ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ delivers an assured voice, an indelible heroine and relatable love stories

Like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Judith Krantz , Bonnie Garmus is a latecomer to the literary scene. This week she publishes her first book — the sparkling novel “ Lessons in Chemistry ” — days shy of her 65th birthday. Hurray for this! If we’re going to continually fuss over newly minted MFA wunderkinds landing two-book deals, let us also raise a glass — or, better yet, Garmus’s book — in honor of this rarer breed of first-time novelists.

With “Lessons in Chemistry,” Garmus, a venerable copywriter and creative director, delivers an assured voice, an indelible heroine and several love stories — that of a mother for her daughter, a woman for science, a dog for a child, and between a woman and man.

We need comic novels more than ever. So where are they?

At the center of the novel is Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist, absurdly self-assured and immune to social convention, “a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.” (Is it any wonder that Oscar-winner Brie Larson is set to play her in an Apple TV Plus “Lessons” series that she will also executive produce?)

The novel is set in the early 1960s in the mythical Southern California town of Commons where, it appears, few people are. Being a woman in science is a hard, lonely road. Elizabeth becomes a national somebody not in the lab but as a kitchen savant on a local afternoon television show called “Supper at Six.” Her nutritious dishes are doused in chemistry with a heaping side order of female empowerment.

“When women understand chemistry," she explains to a reporter, “they understand how things work." Science offers “the real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.” It’s better living through casseroles.

A decade earlier, Elizabeth met Nobel-nominated chemist and master grudge-holder Calvin Evans at the Hastings Research Institute, where he is a star and she is not because, well, sexism. They fit because they don’t anywhere else. Garmus has packed her novel with rowing (“As any non-rower can tell you, rowers are not fun. This is because rowers only ever want to talk about rowing”), heartache, corporate malfeasance and, that most relished and rarest of real-life events, a humiliating comeuppance.

Women are over the underwire bra

Elizabeth is a feminist and modern thinker. She has little talent for ingratiating herself with other people. It is Elizabeth, not her equally eccentric and stubborn swain, who refuses to wed “because I can’t risk having my scientific contributions submerged beneath your name.” Her obstinance, becoming an unwed mother at a time when they were shunted elsewhere, creates a heap of trouble for her in a world nowhere ready for her mind, character or ambition.

There is an infectious absurdity to the book and its hero. Here’s Elizabeth discussing the hydrogen chemical bond on a show ostensibly about dinner: “I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you ladies — a chemical reminder that if things are too good to be true, they probably are.”

Then, with her knife, she takes a “Paul Bunyan swing” at an onion. “It’s chicken pot pie night,” she declares. “Let’s get started.”

Could “Lessons” have been a few instructions tauter? Certainly. Garmus knows her characters from the initial pages. There’s little need to keep informing readers how exceptional they are or how adamant Elizabeth is in pursuing her truth. Also, every dog may have its day, but that doesn’t mean he need scamper through a novel as an astute fictional character. “ Welcome to life on the outside! How was your trip? Please, come in, come in! I’ve got chalk! ” These are the musings of Elizabeth’s dog, Six-Thirty (a nod to the time he joined the family) as he welcomes baby Madeleine into his world.

Still, Garmus manages to charm. She’s created an indelible assemblage of stubborn, idiosyncratic characters. She’s given us a comic novel at precisely the moment we crave one. Perhaps, in her next effort, Garmus will provide a heroine who is more her peer, someone who would be a perfect role for, say, Emma Thompson or Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Karen Heller is national features writer for Style.

Lessons in Chemistry

By Bonnie Garmus

Doubleday. 400 pp. $29

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Summary and Reviews of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry

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First Published:
Apr 5, 2022, 400 pages

Literary Fiction
1940s & '50s
1960s & '70s
Parenting & Families
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Book Summary

A must-read debut! Meet Elizabeth Zott: a "formidable, unapologetic and inspiring" (Parade) scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show in this novel that is "irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat" (The New York Times Book Review).

New York Times Bestseller • Good Morning America Book Club • One of NPR's Best Books of 2022 • One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year—New York Times, Bustle, Real Simple, Parade, CNN, Today, E! News, Library Journal Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ("combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride") proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo. Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Chapter 1 November 1961

Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there'd even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over. Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter's lunch. Fuel for learning, Elizabeth Zott wrote on a small slip of paper before tucking it into her daughter's lunch box. Then she paused, her pencil in midair, as if reconsidering. Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win, she wrote on another slip. Then she paused again, tapping her pencil ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

The late 1950s into the early 1960s was supposedly a halcyon time in American history. But was it? The war was over and men returned home to take back the jobs women had done in their absence. As a result, women were pushed into more subservient roles. What influences played a part in encouraging women to accept their place as only in the home? And why, in today's world, when women are in the workforce in record numbers, are they still doing most of the housework and child-raising?
Elizabeth Zott had no formal education, and yet she was able to self-educate, thanks to her library card. With the advent of technology, the library almost seems outdated, though many would argue that the library is more important than ever. Do you think ...
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Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Bonnie Garmus's debut, Lessons in Chemistry, introduces readers to an exceptional woman struggling to succeed in a male-dominated field. Garmus sets her novel in the days before the Equal Rights Amendment and the #MeToo movement, when most men — and many women as well — believed that any woman who dared to enter a traditional men's profession was either "a lightweight or a gold digger," in the author's words. One might assume the novel is a dark, weighty exploration of the sexual discrimination rampant during the 1950s and early 1960s. Amazingly, it's really not; although the book's substance depends largely on this theme, its overall tone is positive and affirming... continued

(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs ).

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Beyond the Book

A short history of the cooking show.

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The Last Animal

by Ramona Ausubel

A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty