Enchanted Prose

A tender, timeless love story (Chicago 2001, 1991 backstory): Bet you’ll love this pleasure-to-read novel. Sensitive writer, sensitive characters, sensitively rendered romance.

Tracey Garvis Graves dedicates her new novel to “anyone who’s felt like they didn’t belong.” She could have also dedicated it to everyone who’s wished for a second chance, be it love or otherwise. The Girl He Used to Know encompasses both.

Great title. Another, less catchy, could have been The Woman She’s Become. On page 4, the protagonist, Annika, expresses the dual narratives of Then and Now: a “desire to replace the memories of the girl he used to know with the woman I’ve become.”

Structured so we can compare these two Annika’s – the more confident one the novel opens with in 2001 when she’s in her thirties, to her 1991 twenties-self attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a few hours outside of Chicago where she now lives. Over this ten-year span we see how Annika has changed, developmentally and socially, though some parts of her haven’t changed much. Not because she still has a neurological condition and is still head-turning beautiful. But because she’s stayed real and beautiful on the inside.

Annika Rose has an exotic name that matches her “stark beauty.” Sharp cheekbones, big blue eyes, blond hair “almost white,” modeled on another gorgeous soul: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who shockingly perished in a plane crash in 1999 along with her sister and husband, beloved by all, John F. Kennedy Jr.

If you know anyone diagnosed as high-functioning on the autism spectrum, you’ll recognize Annika. Forget labels, stereotyping. Rather, it’s how Graves shows and tells us what it feels like to be Annika, giving her characteristic traits yet shaping her not comically as other novels have done but deeper, compassionately.

Annika is the vulnerable star of this literary show. Two other characters are her stellar supporting cast: Janice and Jonathan, who accepted her in college, made her feel for the first time in her life she did belong, watched her back, loved her. We could all use a Janice and a Jonathan in our lives. One a blessing; two miraculous for a girl who felt “all my life I’ve been an embarrassment to myself.”

The formula for why the novel sings: pitch-perfect dialogue; Annika’s refreshing honesty; Annika’s learning the importance of accepting herself; the extent true love can go; and smart, informed writing that briskly alternates between two narrators’ perspectives (Annika’s voice and Jonathan’s) from two time perspectives.

If it weren’t for Janice, the best roommate in the world, Annika was paired up with freshman year, Annika probably would have dropped out by the end of the first week, since she almost did. Janice’s perceptiveness and kindness saved Annika, steering her to two things she loved most: chess and animals.

Chess club led Annika to Jonathan, assigned to play chess with her during senior year. Chess and volunteering at an animal clinic sustained her; environments where she could block out the noise in her head brought on by overwhelming social anxieties. Chess was a place she felt “I almost fit in”; animals needed her and gave unconditional love. The victim of bullying (home-schooled by seventh grade), no surprise she “simply preferred the company of animals over most humans.”

On page 10, Annika tells us “her brain does not work like other people’s. I think in black-and-white. Concrete. Not abstract.” Literal thinking interferes with understanding the nuances and unspoken meanings of social cues, norms. Back then, Janice and Jonathan helped her navigate. Now Janice lives in New Jersey, married and the mother of a young child (still Annika’s best friend), while Annika and Jonathan haven’t connected since graduation. That’s when he moved to NYC for an investment banking job; she promised to follow him there but didn’t. To work through losing the person who was her “everything,” Annika now has a therapist named Tina talking her through putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Had she been able to do that with Jonathan back then, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Had he continued to put her needs over his perhaps they’d have stayed together, since “no one had loved me as fiercely and unconditionally as she did,” says Jonathan.

Jonathan made the wrong assumptions. Through a couple of twists of fate we don’t see coming – particularly towards the gripping ending – Graves makes sure we get her message about making assumptions.

The opening scene resonates. What would you do if you bumped into your first love, your one and only love? Annika assumed Jonathan was still living in New York, so what’s he doing in Chicago? Caught off guard, yet she’s been preparing for a moment like this, a second chance.

The burning question is whether Jonathan wants that too. Does he still care enough to be willing to push aside hurt/angry feelings after Annika failed to show up? Coming off of a painful divorce, is he still up for “peeling back Annika’s layers”? Ready for another serious relationship?

One thing that might help Jonathan is to see the progress Annika has made. Will he be struck by her bold move to a large city for someone extremely stressed by crowds? Will he note something must have changed now that she tells him she’s working in a busy setting – the main branch of the Chicago Public Library (books always a solace)?

If that doesn’t catch his attention, what does is she’s no longer dressed in long skirts two sizes larger for her “perfectly proportioned body,” so she couldn’t feel the texture of fabric touching her skin. Some sensations unnerved her, especially the sensation of someone touching her. Jonathan was the only person whose touch didn’t jar her. “His touch grounded me and made me feel like nothing bad could ever happen.” Today the woman he meets is dressed to accentuate her femininity. Will he desire to touch her again, intimately?

Annika used to be someone who couldn’t bear people entering her “personal space.” Sound familiar? The novel drops us right into the Me Too era.

Jonathan was initially attracted to Annika’s beauty, but once he appreciates the ease he feels around her, she becomes “much more than a pretty face.” What does that say about getting to know people with disabilities who might not be as physically attractive?

Annika’s conversation used to be simplistic, straightforward, as she didn’t have any filters or experience with men. “Do you want to kiss me”? “Were you flirting with me?” she innocently asks, to which Jonathan charmingly responds: “I was trying to. I thought I was halfway decent about it, but now I’m not so sure.”

Gentle and patient, he teaches Annika how to make love, assuring her he’d never hurt her. Ironically, she hurt him.

Back then it was impossible for Annika to gaze into someone’s eyes, even Jonathan’s. If he and we could see her now: also working with children, interestingly teaching them how to act (in theater) and playwriting, we imagine her smiling and looking straight at them. They love and accept her for the authentic, loving person she is. (She also continues to care for animals.)

Learning to accept others, see their gifts. Be real, honest. Be kind to and look out for others. Why is this so hard for us to do in 2019? An extraordinary love story with implications for all.

Lorraine

Finding the strength to move on (from Wales to the South West Coast Path, England; 2012-2013): You “can never have enough memories,” says Raynor Winn, after her world fell apart at fifty. That’s after: thirty-two years married to her beloved Moth; raising two children now away at college; spending twenty years making their Welsh farm home their own, the land and animals precious to them; losing the source of their income; wiping out their bank account after an investment went sour, fighting a three-year legal battle that failed on a technicality, losing it all.

Catastrophic loss, yet not as earth-shattering as being told the very next day Moth’s shoulder pain and stiffness was due to a rare, progressive neurological disease – corticobasal degeneration, symptoms Parkinson’s-like. If he was lucky and took it easy, maybe he had two years left to live.

After all that gut-punching, would you still be able to say, like the author does, “I chose hope”? 

The couple’s response, coupled with soul-searching prose and vivid nature writing, turned into this moving debut, The Salt Path: A Memoir.

Be prepared to like this devastated couple a lot. For the author’s piercing voice pleading “don’t take him, you can’t take him. He’s everything, he’s all of it, all of me.” For Moth’s generosity, the kind of person who’d take the shirt off his back, because he did. (Gave away their last piece of fudge and coins to someone he felt worse off than he.) For this couple’s “passion that didn’t die,” a gift that together gave them the strength to do something wild and inconceivable. The “wild was never something to fear or hide from. It was my safe place, the thing I ran to, says the “farmer and farmer’s daughter” writer.

If only she was writing fiction. Too cruel to make up. So you’ll read wishing the book doesn’t end. We don’t want to know Moth’s final verdict. 

Raynor Winn “desperately needed a map, something to show me the way,” so in an act of desperation she came up with an audacious idea, inspired by another British nature writer’s guidebook – Paddy Dillon’s Five Hundred Mile Walkies – to trek 630 miles along one of the most spectacular nature walks in all of walkable England, a top ten walking path in the world: the South West Coast Path.

It traverses the windswept, rocky North Devon and North Cornwall coasts along the westerly Atlantic Ocean side of Britain headed south, until landing at Land’s End, the furthest point west, where the trail turns eastward, gets physically less strenuous and more populated, this being the southern English Channel side.

Dillon made it sound so much easier than it was; his pace far outpaced theirs. In fact, this extreme endurance journey is said to equal climbing Mount Everest four times! As long as the Winns could keep moving, they’d escape what-to-do-next realities. Motivation the author needed more, it seems, than Moth. 

Putting themselves in Mother Nature’s hands without creature comforts and enough money called for enormous stamina, positivity, coping skills. “Wild camping” where the weather is often brutal and suddenly, dramatically changes is a formidable undertaking. The winds roared even when it wasn’t raining or pouring so hard it hurt. Backpacks, clothes, tent, sleeping bags all soaked, damp, or misted wet, the worst conditions for Moth whose body didn’t take kindly to the cold and overexertion. Add in funds drained so low they couldn’t afford top-of-the-line outdoor equipment, and having to lug around seventeen pounds of whittled-down essentials on Moth’s already aching back.

The two set off on the path with 50 pounds (roughly 65 dollars exchanged today) to their name, which had to stretch until Moth’s monthly disability check came due, amounting to just 30 pounds. Imagine sustaining yourself through “extreme physio” on noodles, rice, candy (“fudge for breakfast, fudge for lunch, and it was looking like fudge for dinner”), occasionally a little tuna. Starving or when the funds finally came through, splurging on Britain’s famous chips, pasties, ice cream when the temperature was unexpectedly scorching, sheltering in cafes for hours on end, sharing a free cup of hot water and a lonely tea bag. But first they had to reach a village, come out of the remoteness, find a bank. For months and months.

Once, the coveted pasty was free too. Normally tossed out at day’s end but a disgruntled restaurant employee they bumped into treated them to a much- appreciated meal not out kindness but anger at a boss. No food banks to help others also having hard times? Restaurants in America alone waste 63 million tons of food a year by some accounts. 

Another social issue, another cloud that hung over them, making a larger statement about what it means to be homeless, in rural areas. A phenomenon not well-known even to researchers. Difficult to quantify, difficult to identify, not just in England but here at home. 

They call them the “hidden homeless”. Homelessness is typically associated with cities as it’s out in the open on streets, benches, under overpasses. Yet in Britain alone, data show a 40% increase in rural homelessness over a recent six-year period. A US report confirms homelessness in rural America is also rising. A problem, apparently, not on our radar like the urban plight.

One might assume a less judgmental attitude toward those homeless communing in Nature. The truth is no matter where you are people look down on the homeless – as they did toward the Winns. Not everyone, but considering how few encounters over hundreds of miles (mostly dog walkers) too many did. Strangers labeled them “tramps,” stereotyping one or both as afflicted with addiction and/or mental illness, rather than a series of unfortunate events or a single crushing defeat. 

Calling themselves “edgelanders,” this is a story of literally walking and living on the edge. Even finding a flat, comfortable place to pitch a tent (the western coast covered with coarse heather and gorse) was challenging, plus they had to stay out of sight of a possible passerby since wild camping is “technically illegal in England and Wales.” 

By now you’re wondering what the South West Coast Path is like. Narrow, it runs up and down sweeping cliffs that plunge hundreds of feet to beaches, coves, fishing villages. Breathtaking landscapes, diverse ecosystems, marshes, wetlands, “salt-burned” trees, sand dunes, ancient geology. Touristy Cornish villages disorienting. Here are some images to give you a sense:

The author brought a journal, the only way she could have captured the scenery, obstacles, details, emotions as rawly and clearly.

The most poignant moment happens at the beginning, when the author has to say goodbye to her nineteen-year-old sheep, Smotyn. No one would want this aged sheep; somehow she sensed that. The author discovered her “in her favorite spot under the beech trees, her head laid out on the grass as if she were sleeping. She knew. She knew she couldn’t leave her field, her place, and had simply died.” That’s when Winn breaks down, when we first feel the enormity of her loss. Animals have a unique way of communicating what we cannot bear to.

Soon after, the author saw a way to give them a purpose. Follow the path, see how far they could get, how far it would take them. This “wasn’t just about being homeless; it was about achieving something.”

Which they did, expressed in a beautiful message inscribed on a bench in Cornwall: “Meet me there, where the sea meets the sky. Lost but finally free.”

That tells you all you really need to know about the ending.

Lorraine

Refusing to be silenced (Brooklyn 2008; Palestine to Brooklyn 1990s backstories): Etaf Rum is a brave writer. She says as much in a Dear Reader note in an advanced reader copy and the preface to her debut novel, A Woman is No Man, confiding she was “constantly swallowed by fear” writing it, yet she broke a “culture of silence.” 

She must be brave to create a dark plot about arranged marriages in strict, conservative Arab families that isolates Palestinian women with emotional and physical abuse, risking perpetuating negative stereotypes about Rum’s own immigrant community at a time when hate crimes and anti-immigrant sentiments are sharply on the rise in America and globally. “Surely I’ll only upset people and fuel further discrimination already stereotyped by a single story. It would be the ultimate shame,” Rum says. Yet she dares doing so anyway.

Clearly, something else is afoot. Presumably something the author felt morally compelled to write, saying:

“You’ve never heard this story before. No matter how many books you’ve read, how many tales you know, believe me: no one has ever told you a story like this one.” 

Her compelling novel is set in Brooklyn, where Rum was born and lives, perhaps in the same Bay Ridge multicultural community her characters dwell. Bay Ridge is depicted as close-knit. “It was as if all the Arabs in Brooklyn stood hand in hand, from Bay Ridge all the way up to Atlantic Avenue, and shared everything, from one ear to the next. There were no secrets between them.” So why reveal secrets, whether there’s any truth to them or well-fictionalized we perceive these truths to be real? Rum’s confidences about her fears lead us to believe she is exposing truths meant to stay behind closed doors. Why raise the stakes of dishonoring her culture, in which honor and “reputation is everything”?

Rum’s objective, she says, is to highlight the “strength and resiliency” of Arab women. You may see this in one or more of her four main female characters. On the other hand, you may feel overwhelmed by the weakest one, Isra, so battered by loneliness, despair, identity loss, and relentless physical assault she descends into such “paralyzing shame” she becomes ashamed of even existing. Isra endures over the years, but the cost is a shell of a human being, “an empty heart.” 

Will the novel be seen as an act of betrayal? Or, a contemporary woman’s activism to be the voice for the “voicelessness [that] is the condition of my gender”? Will the reader be inspired by defiant characters, or pained by the obedient ones?

Book clubs have plenty to talk about as the novel raises contentious cultural issues in a multilayered, generational approach. 

Four Palestinian women – the two oldest are immigrants, the two younger born in America – show how past cultural traditions keep repeating (the older generations) while their children resist and defy the limits placed on them simply because they’re female. Whose voice will the reader hear? The older ones who believe “obedience is the only path to love”? The younger ones struggling to find “the courage to stand up for yourself, even if you’re standing alone”?

The older women immigrated to Brooklyn from two cities in the West Bank of Palestine, disputed territory in the Israeli-Palestine Peace process.

Their storylines are outlined below, from oldest to youngest:

1. Fareeda: came to the US from a Palestinian refugee camp. Survived poverty, married off in her teens, mother of three sons and a daughter (see Sarah below.) Her influence intensifies as the plot does. She clings to a narrow view of women restricted to the home, that a daughter’s sole purpose is to cook, clean, serve, and become a mother who will give birth to boys; girls are a disgrace, a burden, a curse – the jinn. Men bear burdens too, financially obligated to support their family. Adam, her eldest, bears the brunt, reflecting immigrants “working like dogs,” which plays out destructively when he goes to Palestine and brings home eighteen-year-old Isra through another arranged-for-marriage. It’s their marriage, their sad, abusive story, that overpowers the others. 

2. Isra: unhappy when we meet her at 17. Forced to leave her homeland, her parents, and her pastoral home overlooking fig and olive trees. Raised by a traditional mother who subscribed to the same beliefs about women as Fareeda; a mother who expressed no love or warmth, also like Fareeda. Isra grabs our hearts, so quiet and submissive all she can do is hope that in the land of the free she’ll find love and freedom. Not so when she keeps giving birth to daughters – four in all. She’s the victim of Adam’s anger, angst, exhaustion. Sometimes he unexpectedly hits her over the slightest thing; other times Isra knows when he’s coming for her. 

3. Sarah: Fareeda’s only daughter. Supposedly married off but no one has heard from her. She befriended Isra when she and Adam came to live under Fareeda’s dark roof, in a depressing basement.

4. Deya: Isra’s oldest daughter, the youngest of the four. It’s her melancholy/distraught/confused/questioning narrator’s voice we hear. Yet it’s Isra’s voice from the past that haunts the novel, haunting Deya too. She misses her mother who died when she was eight. That’s ten years ago by the time she tells us these tangled stories. Told her parents died in a car accident, Deya yearns to know more about Isra so she can remember her beyond recalling how unhappy she seemed. If only Fareeda would tell her something perhaps she wouldn’t feel so abandoned and unloved. Fareeda’s silence turns the novel into a mystery as we become suspicious of what really happened to Isra.

Rum’s prose has a gentle rhythm to it. But Isra’s tale, and the sequestered world of these women, isn’t gentle at all. 

One wonderful exception: books are life-savers for these women (except Fareeda). Books are literally the only source of their happiness, dreams, and sense of love. Through literature they “dreamed of bigger things – of not being forced to confirm to conventions, of adventure, and most of all love.” But reading is a major feat, acquiring books and then having to hide them. 

Deya’s world is insular, yet she fights to change it. She wants to go to college, refuses Fareeda’s constant attempts to marry her off. (Note: while Isra didn’t have any choice about Adam, today’s Deya does, though her life made miserable by Fareeda.) Deya’s story is an uphill battle to challenge stereotypes, aware there are other “Arab families who firmly believe in educating their women.’’ 

Deya is confused though. She’s taught in her Islamic studies class women are meant to be respected. But she (and her female classmates) can’t understand her teacher when he asserts “heaven lies under a mother’s feet.” They can’t even answer his question: What is the role of women in their society today?

Rum’s answer: it’s changing. But in order for women to feel they belong in this country they need to “belong to ourselves first,” otherwise, “it’s hard to belong anywhere.”

It seems fair to say belongingness is complicated to navigate for most immigrants. For these women (except Fareeda), it’s made tougher because they feel unwanted in their own home.

Inclusion, self-determination, and freedom are not just messages for Palestinian-American women, but for women everywhere struggling to be heard.

Lorraine

Extreme adventure that reads like unimaginable fiction (Washington, Inside Passage and Arctic Alaska, Canadian Territories; six months 2012): If a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at the video Caroline Van Hemert and her husband Pat Farrell shot during their six-month, mind-boggling expedition covering 4,000 miles of stunning and death-defying landscapes in the northernmost reaches of North America – the subject of this thrilling and beautifully written memoir:

If you cannot imagine adventuring through the Inside Passage of southern Alaska to the Arctic Circle, and doing so entirely with your own “muscles” (travel by an “expedition-style rowboat” Pat built, an inflatable packraft, skis, hiking), in some of the most “bear-dense landscapes on earth” (no gun, just bear spray), amidst “hurricane-force winds,” avalanche dangers, glaciers, snow-covered boulders, mud like quicksand, in temperatures that plunged as low as negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit, across remote backcountry few (if any) humans live, then reading The Sun is a Compass is like watching a National Geographic Special with eye-popping wows.

You’ll also find yourself thinking, like the author writes in her planning notes, “Is this crazy?” The answer is an unequivocal yes; this wild journey undertaken in 2012 was CRAZY! Maybe not quite that absolute for a couple cognizant that “wilderness has become the silent partner in our marriage.”

The author has a way with words that brings awesome wilderness to our doorsteps. Coupled with amazing courage, endurance, persistence, and risk-taking, this is an amazing story of recognizing “certain things in life don’t offer second chances.”

How two extreme adventurers achieved what they’d set out to do (with four months of planning that wasn’t enough), prepared for, experienced, and survived is the stuff of legends. In fact, I googled to see if they’d received any kind of explorer award, surprised not to find any. The memoir should attract wide attention to compensate for that, though it seems highly unlikely these adventurers care much about that. They are the real deal.

Honestly, I don’t know which aspect of their journey stands out the most. I’ll mention some, let you decide.

The author, who submitted her doctoral thesis the night before they set off, is a wildlife biologist specializing in ornithology. Surely her knowledge enriched what the couple saw and felt. Being able to identify a long list of birds acclimated to frigid climates and birds in the midst of the miracle of migration – birds with “remarkable feats of memory and problem-solving” – added immeasurably. So many birds, which you’ll find listed in a detailed index. Warblers, godwits, chickadees, kittiwakes, trogons, gulls, goshawks, guillemots, gyrfalcons, plovers, tussocks, and many more. Enough to satisfy a birder’s life list! But the purpose of spotting them and telling us a little about them is meant to highlight moments “filled with “wonder.” The bird image that sticks with me is the time they came upon a single “trumpeter swan taking a bath” in a glacial lake at five thousand foot elevation.

Seeing these birds in their natural habitats brought the author closer to the field work she’s passionate about, not the academic research she’s dispassionate about – one reason among several this journey was so important to her.

Van Hemert was thirty-three when she and her husband made this expedition, a fork-in-the-road time in their personal and professional lives, expecting it would clarify decision-making especially for the author who “needed a crash course outdoors to remind myself that life is not merely a tally of days, that what really matters cannot be quantified.”

Pat’s path, on the other hand, seemed somewhat determined. A builder of things, he ended up founding an Alaskan company that custom-designs homes for unforgiving climates. The author, who tends to worry compared to her unusually optimistic husband, currently works at the US Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska after much soul-searching.

Van Hemert tells her story when she was at a vulnerable stage in life, unsure of her career direction and motherhood (her sister gave birth shortly after the expedition began), concerned, rightfully so, as to how a child would fit into/constrain extreme adventuring. But family is precious to her; she poignantly stresses about her active father’s recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The trip may be off-the-charts unknowable to most of us, but the personal conflicts and worries are awfully familiar.

While Pat’s arrival in Alaska came via upstate New York (he content to “live in the woods”), the author was raised in Alaska by highly supportive parents who loved and encouraged the outdoors. Van Hemert is devoted to them too, touched they’d think nothing of driving 1,000 miles north to deliver and exchange supplies. Care packages always included much-needed food that was never enough and, except for calorie-laden treats they devoured on the spot, quite dissatisfying (dehydrated and dry food) to reduce the heavy loads strapped on their backs. Imagine how many calories expended in a day! Many times nourishment ran seriously low, one time the author so starved she could barely move. A couple of times the two were saved by “Arctic hospitality,” generous strangers they met in sparsely populated, remote villages or tiny outposts.

While the birds are lovely to read about, it’s the bears that give most pause. They encountered 47 bears; only one was so aggressive they’re lucky to be alive.

Perhaps more impressive was witnessing herds of porcupine caribou crossing waters, “one of the last great migrations of large mammals on earth.”

Also unforgettable was the first 1,200 miles of their trip paddling in over-sized, sleek yet 100-pound, 18-foot rowboats. They were sailors, kayakers, canoers used to staying close to each other; these oars were too long to permit that. Sometimes they rowed without seeing the other – daunting aloneness when dealt with unpredictable, fiercely raging Spring weather when they left from Bellingham, Washington. We’re talking six foot waves, “rowing in the dark through the biggest tide of the decade.”

Those images bring to mind another indelible scene: paddling amongst 40-ton humpback whales breeching.

And yet, when a goat falls off a mountain and recovers gracefully, reminding the author to relish not fear the beauty engulfing them, that graceful goat serves as a symbol of wondrous, fleeting moments. That some of “the most precious things in life are those that don’t last forever.”

Above all those vivid scenes, the climate change message we mustn’t forget. Given the threat to endangered species the Trump Administration endorses, so utterly contrary to grave scientific global warming predictions, observing musk oxen return to the Arctic having vanished after 90,000 years on earth is an encouraging sign that maybe it’s not too late, yet.

The “entire Arctic Marine ecosystem is in peril,” the author writes, evidenced by paddling alongside gigantic ice floes broken off from what used to be “land of persistent ice,” and discovering the relics of creatures lost to the climate’s warming. “Bleached white bones are everywhere as if an entire museum collection had been emptied onto the beach.” The prose ought to alarm. Species are endangered because our environment is endangered.

You don’t have to go to such extremes traveling to the “land of extremes” to believe this. (Colorful, glossy photographs tucked inside show how extreme. The very last picture is a spoiler, so suggest you finish then peruse.) Still, we should applaud two brave people who went to extremes, now warning those who’ve gone to extremes to deny climate change is upon us.

Lorraine

Double pressures – Genetics research and romance in a lab (Manhattan, contemporary times): Plenty of fiction evokes a strong sense of time and place, but we don’t often come across fiction strongly-scented about our sense of smell. Andrea Rothman is perfect for dreaming up a story about genetics researchers seeking the genes responsible for olfaction because she once was one.

Richman’s debut novel is as fresh and smart as the cutting-edge research going on at a genetics lab where she used to work (The Rockefeller University). Her invented lab – American University of Science Research (AUSR) – and the real one are located along Manhattan’s East River, where the city is developing a major Life Sciences Corridor. The author was a postdoctoral fellow researching the “oddball” set of genes responsible for our sense of smell – the scientific plot of The DNA of You and Me. There’s some other DNA also strongly-flavoring the prose involving the chemistry of romance between two geneticists – Emily and Aeden.

For a novel with a scientific theme, fiction readers need a writer who can disarm non-scientists to make the science accessible. We also need a hook we can all relate to by a writer who can charm us with an engaging plot and pleasing prose. Richman proves she has a literary knack for doing both, translating technical science into layman’s terms ever so gently while entangling it with provocative prose on contemporary issues. Taken together, the novel achieves a double effect: gaining a better appreciation of the importance of a sense we may take for granted, and stirring us to think about what matters most to us in life in terms of our goals, values, and ethical principles.

The double helix is a term that refers to the shape of DNA, defined as two strands likened to twisted ladders or staircases. The novel is about the tension between two strands – professional versus personal – both of which twist and turn. This twisting is seen in the sketches of DNA twisted ladders that introduce the novel’s five parts.

This image doesn’t do justice to the complexity of what’s involved in identifying “how the olfactory nerves, hundreds of thousands possessing different odorant receptor types, ultimately reached their targets, allowing us to smell.” The plot and characters center around trying to figure out how that complicated genetics and neuroscience works.

Emily met Justin at a conference in Chicago, where she grew up and was finishing her graduate studies, having already distinguished herself with science journal worthy publication of her clinical cancer findings. Boldly she told him she was “born to” discover the rare olfactory genes. So at twenty-eight he hired her to do just that. Once on board, Justin (forty) saw his younger self: “so single-minded and ambitious, so alone.”

Justin’s judgment of Emily was spot-on. It drives the plot and the serious questions raised. Can a woman like Emily, with her set-in-stone career aspirations and asocial personality (“human company is overrated”) ever be happy with anyone? Is she fated to be alone? What if someone comes along and could be the right person for her, would she be willing to compromise her single-minded professional dedication? How deeply conflicted and risky would that decision be, when Emily cannot even “figure out how to be happy”? Friendless all her life, she really doesn’t know “there’s a purpose to being around other people.” Richman has created a character as odd as the mysterious genes.

Enter Aeden, a postdoctoral fellow Emily meets on day one of her new job, the same day she’s landed in New York. “Men rarely noticed me,” she says, though her fiery red hair would seem to negate that perception. In fact, Aeden does notice her but for the wrong reason.

Aiden begrudges her because he (and lab partner Allegra) have been working for three years on a project similar to the one Justin hired her for. They knew this but Justin never told Emily. Was this ethical, pitting colleagues against each other? Emily tells Justin if he’d told her she never would have accepted the job. Emily knows something about the fierce competition in science labs.

In weighing this ethical question (in a novel that evokes many), we need to factor in that Aeden and Allegra are using traditional lab techniques while Emily is using computers to analyze genetics, a field known as bioinformatics. Justin still should have told her, don’t you think? But all Justin cares about is the race to the top.

Emily and Aeden get off to a very bad start and stay entrenched for a long time. Between Emily’s anti-social personality, Aeden’s resentfulness, and their mutual intensity they’re an unlikely pair. Theirs is a slow-to-develop, difficult relationship analogous to the slow pace of complex science research. The novel, though, moves easily, briskly.

Science tells us something about human beings so look for double meanings. Start with the novel’s cleverly titled five parts: Part 1, The Wrong Genes, cluing us in on failed research and mismatched colleagues. Part II, A Bridge, applies to DNA structure as well as finding a bridge to allow any relationship to foster between the two central characters. Part III, Recombination, is a genetics term and a way to describe the changing nature of Emily’s and Aeden’s relationship. Part IV, Chimera, also from genetics, describes Emily’s romantic crossroads. Fantasy or not?

Emily spent her childhood indoors due to an allergy to the smell of grass, shutting herself off from people, setting a lonely pattern for her future. Her interest in olfactory research was inspired by an allergic condition, but it was also influenced by her father’s work in a chemistry lab.

Actually, there’s a more profound origin for Emily’s solitary preferences despite her saying “for no apparent reason, I didn’t like people very much, and did not care to be around them.” Abandoned by her mother when she was a baby, it’s no wonder she doesn’t trust people and has only been attached to the father who raised her on his own. When the novel opens, he’s already passed away.

No wonder too that Emily finds comfort in an hermetically sealed profession, enabling and rewarding her for cutting herself off from the outside world. Occasionally, she steps out and into it. When she does, nature fills the prose, giving Emily and us a jolt as to what it might feel like cooped up in a lab for crazy long hours, day and/or night. Experiments are timed; ambition has no time limits.

The prose also exudes smells, as Emily is hypersensitive to them. Examples include the “buttery odor” of shampoo, “nicotine on his breath,” the “sea-breeze odor of his T-shirt,” the “rotting fish” odor of a “neuron-staining solution,” and the “mild stench” of the East River. All make the point that smells are tied to memories, good and bad.

Emily is 40 when Chapter 1 opens, looking back on 12 years earlier when she worked in Justin’s lab. So while we think we know the ending told in the early pages – she receives the prestigious Lasker award for her “contribution to neuroscience” – as we get into her backstory we realize we have no idea until the end whether she and Aeden reach the target of coming together, mirroring the quest to reaching the targets to explain how we smell.

Emily is an unusual woman whose scent will linger.

Lorraine