Lessons in Chemistry

A book that might be as good as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow!

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is unique, revelatory, funny, poignant, insightful and outrageous while being a treatise on sexism and its origins in America. At once absurd and filled with horrible as well as heartwarming reality it is a romance and a bildungsroman for our time and our lives. How we can like Calvin and Elizabeth as much as we do is testament to Garmus's talented prose, absurd plotting and the influence of Mad, who isn't mad (in the sense of crazy) at all. And there is a dog, of course, Six-Thirty, who understands life deeply through smell, and who, by the end of the book, knows 981 words. And why wasn't the cover a reproduction of Mad's family tree?

What a wonderful book!