Dear God, where do I start.

The book opens with Zott at her workplace, Hastings research institute. She's the only real chemist there, but because she's a woman, no-one takes her seriously.
OK, this is really early in the book, so I can still have some suspension of disbelief and move on.
The book abruptly recounts, in graphic detail, Elizabeth's sexual abuse incident. This chapter is ridiculously jarring, and feels like it was purely for shock value and also so that reader's sympathize with Zott. There's no further exploration of how this event affected her, how she recovers, or how she deals with the trauma when she has sex with her lover.

She falls in love with Calvin Evans, in a typical rivals to lovers kindof fashion, except it only took 2 chapters and felt like a convenient plot thing. I've read plenty of enemies to lovers books and I usually love it as a trope. It's intresting to see two people who are on opposing factions or get a poor first impression slowly get to know each other and find that they click. The problem here is that almost all of it happens off-screen.

Calvin and Elizabeth move in together and we get more of the same, they love each other but I genuinely have no clue why. As an aromantic, I generally couldn't tell you what makes or brakes romance, but this books chooses to tell the reader how much they love each other far too much without showing anything of substance.
Calvin also happens to conveniently share Elizabeth's (rather radical for the setting) political views.
Calvin dies a sudden and horrible death, which is again described in graphic detail in the text. This whole chapter was a struggle to read because it opens with information about funding cuts to the police department, and then describes the visceral details of Calvin being run over by a police car.

Elizabeth is pregnant with Calvin's daughter and she somehow manages to provide for her family until her daughter Madeline is 4 years old.
Madeline is a genius who reads Storm and Fury as a 4 year old, how nice and cute.

Elizabeth is then offered a job as the host of a cooking show, because did I mention, she's extremely sexy?
There's a whole lot of filler, but the gist is that Zott makes a few friends, cooks very robotically in a no nonsense way, almost gets sexually assaulted again, gets a bad article written about her, quits her job as the tv host and returns to chemistry research.
The second abuse encounter is about as delicately handled in the book, as it is in my previous sentence. She pulls out a 14 inch knife and the predator faints. There's no mention of how this might bring back Elizabeth's trauma, or how much if affected her emotionally, or anything at all.
The cooking show is supposedly revolutionary because it takes women seriously and speaks to them as adults with a brain. This facet again suffers from the writer's habit of tell not show.

The biggest problem this book suffers from is the "protagonist". I put that word in air quotes because she has the depth of a puddle. A good protagonist gets some character development, but you can't have that when there's no character in the first place.
Elizabeth’s views and actions are not consistent with the era. It’s as if a woman from the 2020's time traveled back to the 1950s and then lectured everyone with lengthy monologues on social issues and women’s rights. And thats all she does the entire book.
The book tries to shoehorn Zott's chemistry qualifications by having her refer to household things by thier chemical names all the time. The fact that she refers to coffee by C₈H₁₀N₄O₂ is not quirky, especially since a chemist should be the first to point out that coffee and caffeine are not the same thing, and there are hundreds of molecules with the chemical same chemical formula. A middleschooler would be smart enough to know this.
The fact that she has a home lab instead of a kitchen, and yet manages to cook food there should be indicator enough of the foolishness of this whole charade.

The rowing subplot is also really infuriating. Zott studies the physics of rowing, and so she magically becomes a better rower than 6 feet tall men who have been practicing for years. This is just unrealistic, and plain stupid.

My expectations going into this book were that Zott would teach women to value themselves through her cooking show, and then find herself as a figurehead in the 1960's feminist movement. Except this books ends before the movement starts, and Elizabeth goes back to her chemistry career before anything intresting can happen.

Zott also has the political views of an average liberal white woman. Gay, feminist and atheist.

This book also does an incredibly poor job of handling topic like abuse. The main character and her love interest were both raised in traumatic households, but the effects of that are not explored at all.

My current religious belief are kindof up in the air as of may 2026, but even I felt like the depictions of religion were unnecessarily hostile. The general tone seems to be that religious people are fools chasing after something that does not exist, and that the institutions of faith are corrupt and predatory.
I have a lot of respect and a healthy amount of envy for anyone who believes in higher powers. It's incredibly freeing to know that someone is looking out for you. I do acknowledge that faith can drive people to do bad things, and that it's far from perfect, but the undertone of aggression is just not something I can abide.

It's also very poorly researched, the 1950's setting is only seen in the men's attitudes and even then, it seems cartoonishly exaggerated to make feminsim as a cause seem more palatable.

The ending. It's so mind numbingly bad I can't stop cringing. Elizabeth gets her job as a researcher back because a woman who happens to be Calvin's estranged mother buys the whole institute and basically hands it back to her on a shiny silver platter. Over the course of this entire book, Elizabeth manages to not make a single chemistry breakthrough or lead any sort of change in society. She's just right, and nothing comes of it.

If there's one thing I learned from this book; its that the worse the book, the more I have to say about it.