True confession—I should have heeded that overused warning: “Don’t start this book before you go to bed. It will keep you up all night.” Last week I was awake at three o’clock one morning, immersed in Blake’s page-turner. Yikes!

What a brilliant premise! A young woman is found asleep in a remote cabin in the woods with a bloody knife in her hands. In the cabin next door are her two best friends, murdered in their beds. When the police arrive, the woman doesn’t wake up, a victim of the mental health malady “Resignation Syndrome,” the post-traumatic result of having witnessed (or participated in) something so horrifying that her mind has withdrawn from the world and retreated into itself. She is kept alive in an institution for four years until Amnesty International demands that the hospital release her on grounds of “inhumane treatment” or awaken her to stand trial for murder. Psychologist Benedict Prince must find a way to unlock her terrifying secrets and wake her up.

This novel has special resonance with me, since I had worked as a psychotherapist before my retirement. I follow Blake down the rabbit holes of the mind. I’m ensnared in the web he so artfully weaves. At times I find it hard to breathe. And now that I’m finished with the story, I am haunted by it. Read it at your own peril!

I think I’ve used this idea before, but it’s certainly true of this book. Lessons in Chemistry should come with a black box warning: THE AUTHOR ASSUMES NO LIABILITY FOR READERS WHO LOST SLEEP, SKIPPED WORK, FORGOT TO EAT, OR NEGLECTED CHILDCARE DUTIES BECAUSE THEY FELT COMPELLED TO CONTINUE READING NONSTOP. This novel is at once laugh-out-loud funny, disturbingly poignant, and spot-on in its acerbic observations of human nature and society.

Set in the late 50s and early 60s, it tells the tale of brilliant chemist, Elizabeth Zott, whose intellect and talent a male-dominated world refuses to acknowledge. After defending herself from sexual assault by the head of a university’s Science Department, she is summarily expelled from school without a degree. She lands a job at the Hastings Research Institute, where her original work “must be the product of the man she’s in love with,” and is ultimately stolen and published by another man. Along the way, she becomes pregnant “out-of-wedlock,” (in the eyes of her employer, a crime located somewhere between murder and kidnapping), and is fired immediately. Eventually, she winds up as the host of a cooking show on afternoon TV, Supper at Six, where, in addition to lecturing her female audience on the chemical composition of the foods and additives they so mindlessly ingest, she provides them with recipes for skewering the status quo.

Lessons in Chemistry is full of unforgettable characters, not the least of which are Six-Thirty, a German Shepherd who flunked out of the police academy’s bomb-sniffing squad, and “Mad” Zott, Elizabeth’s precocious child, the brainy bane of her Kindergarten teacher.

Author Garmus has written a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. If you haven’t read it already (per usual, I’m late out of the gate), start today! Then share it with someone you love.

I was very late in coming to this book, which already has more than 220,000 ratings on Amazon! As I’m sure you’re well aware, it’s an extraordinary novel, a work of art. Author Doerr paints and sculpts with words, creating unforgettable scenes with metaphors and similes that are often startling in the way they leap off the page. I sometimes felt I was in the presence of a word-magician, wondering, “How did he do that? How did he find those words for that event?”

The narrative follows the adventures of a blind teenage girl in Nazi-occupied France, whose museum-employed father has been entrusted to protect a large diamond, the Sea of Flames, from the invading German troops. He refuses to believe the legend of the stone’s curse: that it will provide its bearer with eternal life while all those associated with him will suffer terrible tragedy.

A parallel story is that of German adolescent Werner Pfennig, gifted with a genius for understanding and building radios, and conscripted into service to find those in the French resistance sending forbidden codes to the advancing American army.

The reader is challenged time and again by contradiction, as the author writes about the horrors of war in piercingly beautiful prose. Not only that, but the writer goes on to describe, in understated but heart-breaking terms, the posttraumatic stress coiled like a parasite in the minds of survivors for the rest of their lives.

Ultimately, the novel becomes a testament to human folly and the willful ignorance of world leaders and nations who believe that human problems can be solved on the battlefield.

Given the current state of affairs, I fear we may beat the tribal drums yet again and march our children off to fight another war with “the enemy”: other children whose mothers also nursed them and loved them and loosed them on the world.

Unfortunately, the old folk song still rings true: “Where have all the flowers gone?”

I just received a stellar book review of my last Driftwood Mystery from Red Headed Book Lover. Click the pic to read it, and then take a look at Aimee’s website.