Guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

Who IS this woman (not main character Elizabeth Zott but author Bonnie Garmus)?! I want to visit with her about how this all came to be. I am guessing that Elizabeth probably grew and brewed for her for quite some time and has likely played a role in Garmus’s raising of “two pretty amazing daughters” as well. So for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to my wannabe writer self, my own loving of London (and Garmus now living there), and my being-mom-to-five-pretty amazing-daughters-ness, dear Bonnie: I’d like to chat!

This is somehow a funny book, despite its serious subject and its being about things that are really not funny when you are living and enduring them and/or have experienced, yourself, challenges at all comparable to main character Elizabeth Zott’s…or when on the very days you are reading the book the US is discussing overturning Roe v. Wade and taking us even further backwards in women’s “rights.” This book is funny, maybe, because Garmus takes off the filter of appropriateness with/for EZ, and just has her confront and very directly all of the things that are wrong with this 1950s-1960s treatment of women, Zott boldy dismissing some of the “rules” and Calvin Evans sort of paving the way by doing the same.

Elizabeth Zott is a character who will long linger in my mind. I see WWEZD bracelets and tshirts and posters, and I DEFINITELY hope there is at the very least a sequel if not a full series further developing not only what’s next for Elizabeth and her daughter Mad(eline), but also for Walter, Harriet, Avery Parker, Dr. Mason, the women’s rowers, and more. These are all people I now care about, and really much like the entire community of characters develped in Jan Karon’s Mitford series…but of a different time, place, and series of circumstances. I do hope there are more books brewing, Bonnie Garmus!

I suppose that not all will love this book as much as I did–some readers have already told me so–but I entertain that conversation of disagreement as well. I think Elizabeth Zott is a bright and brilliant woman, a chemist and a mom and a “widow,” a fighter for equal rights and opportunities. And she IS funny…but not in a laugh at but laugh with, I think, sort of way.