What if you took a very modern female chemist who expects everyone to treat her based on her brains, skills, and accomplishments and dropped her in a misogynist chemistry lab in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Rather than go along to get along she is blunt, direct, and uncompromising. Things go about as well as you would expect for an unmarried mother who challenges the powers that be and the status quo.

I'm guessing a lot of people will love this book because Elizabeth Zott is uncompromising and fights the good fight. It wasn't enough for me, and I bounced off the first half of the book because it is really slow, setting up the character and situation with a litany of sexism.

But I think the part that got me the most was that the setup felt too constructed. For example, a secretary from Zott's employment becomes the typist for a minister who just so happened to have been a pen pal of Zott's former love. Everything was just too neatly tied together.