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A review by thephdivabooks
The DNA of You and Me by Andrea Rothman
4.0
Somber, intense, and deeply thought-provoking, Andrea Rothman’s The DNA of You and Me is the sort of book that left me with a quiet pensive feeling about women, love, ambition, and sacrifice.
I finished The DNA of You and Me more than a day ago and the emotions I felt reading it and through the end have stayed with me. Sometimes a book is so well-written that it brings a stark moment of clarity to my own life that is both uncomfortable and important. (I think this is what the J.D. Salinger may have described as the sound of one hand clapping)
This is not a romance, though it is a story about love. And this is an important distinction to make, I think. A romance implies a certain amount of fun, infatuation, and wooing. A story about love is different from a love story. To me, The DNA of You and Me is truly a story about love, but it is the type of love that feels authentic and without the dramatic flair a novel normally brings.
When Emily meets Aeden in the lab, they don’t immediately click. Aeden is worried about Emily starting rival research within their own lab, and Emily has never really learned how to connect with others. Watching their love develop slowly, as they pushed through genetic research to understand the genes that relate to our olfactory sense, I found the humanization of the dry research lab to be one of the shining points to this book.
Emily herself is compelling, tragic, and root-able. She wears her loneliness like a suit of armor. She I confused over whether she should choose ambition or love. Or more specifically, whether she should choose her legacy or her happiness.
“The gene will be here 100 years from now. But you and I won’t.”
As I’ve spent the past 24 hours reflecting on the story, I think that the story isn’t even really about choosing career or love. More nuanced, the story to me was about how hard it is to truly understand what we want when we are living it. But also that perhaps it is truly never too late.
Thank you to TLC Book Tours for my copy. Opinions are my own.
I finished The DNA of You and Me more than a day ago and the emotions I felt reading it and through the end have stayed with me. Sometimes a book is so well-written that it brings a stark moment of clarity to my own life that is both uncomfortable and important. (I think this is what the J.D. Salinger may have described as the sound of one hand clapping)
This is not a romance, though it is a story about love. And this is an important distinction to make, I think. A romance implies a certain amount of fun, infatuation, and wooing. A story about love is different from a love story. To me, The DNA of You and Me is truly a story about love, but it is the type of love that feels authentic and without the dramatic flair a novel normally brings.
When Emily meets Aeden in the lab, they don’t immediately click. Aeden is worried about Emily starting rival research within their own lab, and Emily has never really learned how to connect with others. Watching their love develop slowly, as they pushed through genetic research to understand the genes that relate to our olfactory sense, I found the humanization of the dry research lab to be one of the shining points to this book.
Emily herself is compelling, tragic, and root-able. She wears her loneliness like a suit of armor. She I confused over whether she should choose ambition or love. Or more specifically, whether she should choose her legacy or her happiness.
“The gene will be here 100 years from now. But you and I won’t.”
As I’ve spent the past 24 hours reflecting on the story, I think that the story isn’t even really about choosing career or love. More nuanced, the story to me was about how hard it is to truly understand what we want when we are living it. But also that perhaps it is truly never too late.
Thank you to TLC Book Tours for my copy. Opinions are my own.