Another of the books that I’d seen everywhere, people seemed to rave about, it was on the shelf in the supermarket, so I grabbed it to try, and I’m glad I did!
It’s the 1950s and Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, specifically a chemist. It’s not an easy time to be a woman in science. She meets a man, a few things happen, which I won’t spoil, though he does get her into rowing, and then a few years later we find her as a single mother and unemployed. She ends up hosting a cooking show on TV, (because of course, cooking is just chemistry), but goes a lot more science-y and a lot less girly than her producers would like! There is so much more to it than this, but I don’t want to give too much away.
Her dog, “six thirty” is one of my favourite things about the book, she decides she’s going to teach him words, hundreds by the end of it, which sounds ridiculous, but it somehow seems reasonable, because after all, dogs are clever creatures! Sometimes the book tells things from the dogs perspective, and somehow it’s just the most heart warming parts of the book!
I really enjoyed this, have already passed it on for my mum to read!
One of my measures of writing I’ve enjoyed is when I’ve turned down a load of page corners, which I did with this, so here are some of my favourite lines:
“She certainly didn’t like favours. Favours smacked of cheating.”
“She continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”
“People were always insisting they knew what [fiction] meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning.”
“Not that there was anything wrong with being unattractive. She was unattractive and she knew it. […] But none of them were – or would ever be – ugly. Only [he] was ugly, and that was because he was unattractive on the inside.”
“As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day – a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.”
“‘Sure as death and taxes.’
‘Everybody dies. […] But not everyone pays their taxes.'”
“‘I think we both know, […] that God is just a bit different from Yahtzee.'”
“‘All dogs have the ability to bite. […] Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.'”
“The unrelenting burden of misunderstanding” – this sums up so much of the book, give it a go and you’ll see!
ineke.co.uk 