Chemistry Lessons

Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some are afraid of her intellect, some of the sharp 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). The whimsical zigzag of fate brought her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamt of studying abiogenesis (the theory of the origin of life 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 watchful eye of a mine detection dog named Six-Thirty, is trying to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer in the school library, as well as to build a family tree that should include a Nobel laureate in chemistry, Calvin Evans, a fairy godmother, a grandfather in a striped prison robe, and a grandmother hiding from the tax police in Brazil....