A review by rochellem
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

lighthearted sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I honestly wish I hadn’t read this. 

It’s usually something I would never pick up, but after attending a workshop about it’s release and hearing rave reviews about how it’s both mass-market and literary (hint: it is certainly not the latter), that it would be the debut of 2022 and that people had never read anything like it, I decided to give it a go.

It makes me feel unsettled that this is already so popular and heavily marketed when there are much, much better debuts to be supporting. 

The writing is often preachy and too on-the-nose, and by the end of the book it became thinly-veiled self-help. This book was definitely written for a screen adaptation, and I think there some of the so-called funny elements of this book (like characters having the same thoughts, each time described with the same sentences set a paragraph apart, which got old very quickly) would work, and the audience won’t have to suffer through the awful metaphors.

It took me a week to finish this, which is slow considering how badly I wanted to get it over with, and speaks to how many times I had to put it down because I really wanted to stop reading it. The treatment of discrimination, especially in the research institute, was  triggering to me (as someone who has faced similar circumstances in a physics research institute) and it felt like the writer was insinuating that women don’t face treatment like this anymore. The fairy-tale ending doesn’t help either. 
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