Reviews with content warning for Gaslighting - Уроки химии

While I loved the characters and the premise of a strong, female lead in the 1950’s demanding to be seen and heard as an expert in her field, I thought the beginning of the book was a bit difficult to get into. The writing style wasn’t appealing to me at first and took some getting used to but by the end of the book it felt more natural. The realities of becoming a scientist during a time period when women were only considered homemakers was an important and interesting story to learn more about.

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my_personal_escape's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny hopeful informative sad medium-paced

4.5

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lokes's review against another edition

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funny hopeful informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

tw: mentions of rape

Well, I’m not really sure how to rate this one… I quite liked the characters and the stories, even if it bordered on the whimsical and imaginary at times (like the hyper intelligent dog, the many coincidences between characters and especially the major plot points, etc), and the main character was feminist in the sense of the 21th century, which did throw me off a few times. Also, there is no intersectionality to the feminism of the main character, and her motto seems to be „tell women you’re proud of them and make their unpaid, invisible work (namely the house hold chores and child rearing) visible and tell them, that you’re proud of them doing it, and they’ll revolt and become suffragettes!“
The only really bad part would be the rape scenes, because the author gave the characters absolutely no reaction to that (apart from her crying once and being slightly disturbed while giving her police statement), and later even went as far as to make her pull out a kitchen knife when another male character tries to rape her (which leads to him immediately having a heart attack), all the while never letting Elizabeth have the room to acknowledge the trauma she suffered before, or working on said trauma, as if the rape made her a better, stronger women and wasn’t trauma at all, but simply something she needed to go through in order to become a feminist/independent woman.
Apart from that, I think I liked it, even though the underlying plot is still about a man - her lover - and his long lost family. But hey, he was “one of the good ones”, to say it in the characters words…

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