Newton's third law says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Life has given me a different turn lately that I will phrase it into another law: If you raise your only daughter to be a reader without banning what she reads and she grows up to be a librarian, you can never tell what kind of books she is going to recommend that you add to your reading list.
Anna suggested Betty by Tiffany McDaniel a while back, knowing that I like authentic Appalachian stories. That was a compelling and very hard read and caused me to look for the ease of an Agatha Christie to follow up.
With her current recommendation, I am reading Lessons in Chemistry. In the early 1960s, Elizabeth Zott refuses to be an average woman because she doesn’t think such a thing exists. Her interests lie in science rather than in becoming married with children as society expects. Her work in science is taken and credited to men while her compensation and recognition is rated as a lab technician until life takes a strange turn. Landing on a TV show titled “Supper at Six” because of her looks and cooking ability, gives her the opportunity to engage the science of meal preparation and honor the watching housewives for their intelligence and ability to manage households. Humor and her functional #2 pencil mix through this entire process. Her dog, Six-Thirty, a failed military bomb sniffer with huge understood vocabulary, becomes almost a co-parent to the daughter she is raising to be a replica of herself. Interweaving story lines and coincidences become plausible and lead to having to read just one more chapter.
Just to be clear, Lessons in Chemistry has moved my today’s “To-Do” list to tomorrow. The only remaining question is which book Anna will add to my list next.