Hey all, I'll probably get a few down votes for this, but I just finished Lessons in Chemistry this weekend and was pretty disappointed. I really liked the book at first, but as time went on, I felt like the storyline became incredibly predictable and the characters lacked a lot of substance. The author's personal 21st century views, though, came through loud and clear as she tried passing them off on someone living in the 50s/60s time frame. It just didn't work. I wanted so much to like this, but overall, the writing felt as though it lacked substance, much of a plot line, and then rushed at the end to wrap up the story. I'm so disappointed because so many people liked this.
If you also felt similarly to me on this, what book did you really enjoy that you would recommend?
by liziloo927
5 Comments
A book that I loved that touched on similar themes of grief and smart women/mothers succeeding when odds against them is Hotline by Dimitri Nesrallah. It is very moving and stayed with me long after I read it. It had many similar themes but was felt a bit more authentic and less “Hollywood“ than lessons in chemistry.
No down vote from me! Emotionally manipulative and narrattively false. I didn’t buy a word of it. Suffers from almost the exact same fundamental issue as the movie Poor Things: she overcomes the patriarchy by being ignorant of indifferent to it’s norms (comedy and/or feel good moments ensue), while only bothering to glancingly addresses the systems and other (capitalist) strictures when it suits them.
It wasn’t my favorite book either, I think it was overhyped. I liked “True Biz” by Sara Novic, it’s about a girl that is deaf. It opened my eyes to a lot of things that the deaf community faces that I wasn’t aware of.
It was a DNF for me, I hated it. So take my upvote 🙂
Have you read Demon Copperhead?
I could not finish this!! I got about halfway through maybe less I became so uninterested in the story