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Read: January 2023

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel

by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus is a must-read book as it reimagines the gender dynamics of the 1950s and early 1960s. Elizabeth Zott, a chemist, struggles in a male-dominated world where her work is not taken seriously until she meets Calvin Evans. She describes their relationship, “Calvin and I were soulmates,” like Jan and I viewed ours.

What underlies their love affair was “a mutual respect for the other’s capabilities.” “Do you know how extraordinary that is?” she said. That a man would treat his lover’s work as seriously as his own?” Of course, every relationship should be based on the same dynamics, but even after seventy years, we still struggle to achieve equality in our society.

I highly recommend this novel. Reading the story, the Zott/Evans relationship reminded me of the love that Jan and I shared. I know that Jan would have loved this book.

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. Like Jan, Elizabeth Zott, the protagonist, would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman.

Although Jan and Elizabeth had much in common, I felt Madeline (aka Mad), Elizabeth’s daughter, was Jan’s alter ego in this novel. Jan was smart and ahead of her classmates, just like Mad was. She was breaking barriers when she was Mad’s age.

I also connected to Six Thirty, the dog. Like Oscar, Six Thirty was more intelligent than the average dog.

Lessons in Chemistry has been the number one best-selling book in the New York Times for thirty-four weeks.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s the early 1960s and Elizabeth Zott’s 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.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: December 2021

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Half in Shadow: A Novel

by Gemma Liviero

Half in Shadow by Gemma Liviero is an unforgettable novel about courage, love, and consequences at the dawn of World War I. In German-occupied Belgium, a tragic loss forces Josephine Descharmes to navigate dangerous new territory. By day it’s compliance, serving German officers at the Hotel Métropole. By night it’s resistance, working with her brothers underground to help Allied soldiers and civilians across the border into Holland. Both paths put her and her family at significant risk.

Before Jan’s death, I preferred to read non-fiction or fiction about historical events. Although I had read nothing by the author before this novel, I decided to read based on the summary. When I finished the book, the author described her goal as a writer in a manner that confirmed my decision.

“Much of my aim in the stories I write is to put human faces, be they fictional, to the many who lived through these events and imagine the experiences and reactions by innocent parties thrust into such situations.”

— Half in Shadow: A Novel by Gemma Liviero

Josephine’s involvement in the resistance begins slowly and gains strength with every page. Her brothers Eugene, Xavier, and her mother become realistic due to the precise writing of Ms. Liviero.

Arthur, the English soldier who falls in love with Josephine, becomes an equal member of the resistance and the family. Franz, the German in love with Josephine, is not as strongly defined as appropriate as he is the enemy.

The Amazon overview provides a brief overview of the novel.

As Josephine struggles to keep her family safe, Arthur, a grief-stricken English soldier trapped behind enemy lines, finds purpose and hope with Josephine and her work. Meanwhile, Franz, a German officer remorseful for war casualties, offers her protection and opportunity. These two men from opposing sides will open her heart and test her loyalties.

Amid the sorrows of war and threats of mortal danger and betrayal, Josephine must steer her fate. In a country deprived of freedom, she will make an impossible choice—one that will forever impact the family she cherishes and the man she loves.

The book’s conclusion, which I will not reveal, brings together all of the novel’s threads in a way that reminded me of the power of love and family.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I highly recommend it.

Half in Shadow is the first time I have gotten a book from Amazon First Reads. I highly recommend First Reads as a way to read books earlier than their regular release. Half in Shadow is not scheduled to be published until January 1, 2022.

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Read: December 2021

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God Shot by Chelsea Bieker

by Chelsea Bieker

God Shot by Chelsea Bieker, one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020, is about the town of Peaches, California, where drought has settled in for the long term. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms.

In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. Everybody is praying for survival through secret “assignments” to bring the rain.

God Shot is an enjoyable read. However, I first found it challenging to accept Pastor Vern’s assignments, especially to Lacey May and her fellow teenage girls. Would people believe in a cult leader and get “assignments” that involve women fully accepting male domination in the twenty-first century? When I had doubts, I would wake up, listen to the news, or read the papers and discover that it is plausible and does happen in our world.

After being god-shot, Lacey May becomes one day at a time feminist as she has to rely on herself and other women who do not accept Pastor Vern’s divine leadership. Slowly but surely, she and her friends find a miracle to help them escape not only the environmental disaster caused by the drought but the moral depravity of Pastor Vern.

Goodreads provides this overview of the God Shot.

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit, humor, and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.

I recommend this novel without reservations!

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Read: March 2022

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The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow was on hold at my library for several weeks. It arrived today, and I could not imagine a better book to read for Women’s History Month. An homage to women’s invincible power and persistence, The Once and Future Witches reimagines stories of revolution, motherhood, and women’s suffrage—the lost ways are calling.

Although I found the book at times a slow read, I enjoyed it very much and highly recommend it. My only regret is that it had less to do with the suffrage movement than expected. In the late 1800s, three sisters used witchcraft to change the course of history in this powerful novel of magic, family, and the suffragette movement.

Goodreads summary provides an overview.

In 1893, there was no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.

But when the Eastwood sisters―James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna―join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote―and perhaps not even to live―the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There’s no such thing as witches. But there will be.

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Read: March 2022

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Lucky Us: A Novel

by Amy Bloom

Having surpassed my Goodreads 2022 reading goal, I wanted a lite, historical fiction book and found this one in the e-library. Lucky Us by Amy Bloom is a book that hooked me on the opening line – “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it.

The first section in Hollywood was the one I found less appealing. Partly that is because I identified with Eva, and she does not fulfill her leading role until the last two sections. Its depiction of how people survived the way years by sometimes is a reminder of our inner resilience.

Goodreads provides the following summary.

So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.

Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.

With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

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Read: September 2024

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel

by David Mitchell

Today, I started reading Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell, one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary, voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins treating him for a rare species of brain parasite.

The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, the West Coast in the 1970s, an inglorious present-day England, a Korean superstate of the near future where neo-capitalism has run amok, and, finally, a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. What sets Cloud Atlas apart is its unique narrative structure, which boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. This journey reveals how the disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s diverse settings and cultures, from 1850 Chatham Isles to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, appeal to readers across the globe, offering a rich and varied reading experience.

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