Lessons in Chemistry

Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some are afraid of her intellect, some of the sharply pointed pencil she carries in her hair, and some of the fourteen-inch knife from her handbag (after all, every self-respecting chef uses only their own knives). A whimsical twist of fate has brought her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamed of studying abiogenesis (the theory of life arising from inorganic substances), to television, where she hosts the most popular cooking show in the country, “Dinner at Six.” “Cooking is chemistry,” she says. “And chemistry is life. It gives us the opportunity to change everything, including ourselves.” Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter Madeline, growing up under the supervision of a mine-sniffing dog named Six-Thirty, tries to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer in the school library, as well as build a family tree that should include a soon-to-be Nobel laureate in chemistry, Calvin Evans, a fairy godmother, a grandfather in a striped prison robe, and a grandmother hiding from tax police in Brazil... For the first time in Russian!