Lessons in Chemistry in 2025 Reading Challenge

From the Bookshelf of 2025 Reading Challenge…

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus

Start date: May 1, 2023

Finish date: May 31, 2023

Discussion: May 2025 Group Read

Why we're reading this: Group Read for May 2023
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May 2025 Group Read

Little Fires Everywhere: Pre-Reading Discussion
By Winter , Group Reads · 6 posts · 25 views

last updated May 11, 2025 09:18AM

Little Fires Everywhere: Reviews by 2025 Reading Challengers
By Winter , Group Reads · 2 posts · 24 views

last updated May 04, 2025 10:47AM

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What Members Thought

May 24, 2022 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok

Shelves: everyone-loved-it-except-me, era-mid-20th-c, lotsa-buzz, fiction, only-reading-because-of-the-buzz, wouldnt-normally-read, womens-day, ohno-its-magical-realism, historical-fiction

It's funny how some books just become The Book.聽 That Book that everyone, simply everyone, is talking about.聽 Sometimes it's not at all clear why.聽 It's some kind of perfect storm: the perfect marketing campaign, perfect page-turning writing, and a topic that meshes perfectly with something that just happens to be floating in the air at the moment.

This book was a really fun read, but I also, perhaps perversely, hated it.聽 At times I was angry at all the buzz that convinced me to read it.聽 I shou ...more

11 likes · Like · see review

Jul 14, 2022 Heather Wescott rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book was highly enjoyable to me with one glaring exception. Elizabeth Zott states at one point that human beings are 99.9% identical to one another at the DNA level - this is true but there is no way she would know that at the time this book was supposed to take place. The structure of DNA had only been reported in 1953 and the first sequence of any organism wouldn't be published until 1977 (a bacteriophage, not a human - that didn't come until 2003). This huge error really bugs me but not ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 23, 2023 Bea rated it really liked it

Enjoyable read even if it is a little over the top. I am old enough to remember the 50s and early 60s when there were no (or extremely rarely) women holding jobs like pilots, doctors, lawyers, school principles, news anchors, policemen, CEOs. The book does make all men except one seem like power hungry, clueless sexual predators. Read it with a sense of humor and think about how far we have come.

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