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Summary
Summary
A Selected Title of the National Book Foundation and the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation's Science + Literature Program
In 1920, having persuaded her resistant mother to send her to college, Kate Croft falls in love with science. Painfully rebuffed by a girl she longs for, and in flight from her own confusing sexuality, Kate finds refuge in the calm rationality of biology: its vision of a deeply interconnected world, and the promise that the new field of genetics can explain the way people are.
But science, too, turns out to be marred by human weakness. Despite her hard work and extraordinary gifts, Kate struggles, facing discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. At the same time, a love affair is threatened by Kate's obsession with figuring out the meaning of the puzzling changes she sees in her experiments. The novel explores what it takes to triumph in the ruthless world of mid-20th-century genetics, following Kate as she decides what she is--and is not--willing to sacrifice to succeed.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pastan (Lady of the Snakes) delivers an inspiring story of triumph against the odds in a historical based loosely on the life of Nobel-winning scientist Barbara McClintock. Kate Croft is the black sheep of her family--she's more interested in college than boyfriends--and after she enrolls in a biology 101 class her freshman year, the question of "how we come to be the way we are" sets her on course for a lifetime of scientific inquiry. Guided by her vexing mentor at Cornell, she chooses to study the genetics of maize. As her career blossoms, Croft is crushed and then angered by the repeated intellectual thefts committed by her male colleagues. Nonetheless, she perseveres. Alliances and romances with other women are a balm, but they also bring conflict, as Croft confronts a choice between love and ambition. Pastan makes a spirited character study out of Croft's doggedness and triumph, and describes various complex scientific concepts with aplomb. This swift story educates as much as it excites. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
A female geneticist makes her way through the scientific world of the mid-20th century. Even before her first brush with cytogenetics in college, Kate has always known she was different--alienated by her appearance-focused mother and sister; "stifled and out of place" in the small Brooklyn house where she'd grown up. Shaped by the memory of her father, a physician who'd died in World War II when she was a child, Kate has "always been interested in where things came from and how they worked…in what was going on under the rubbery skin of the visible world." But it's only when Kate takes an introductory biology course at Cornell that her lifelong preoccupation with genetics begins to blossom. As a research assistant in the school's greenhouses, Kate is taught to study the inherited characteristics of hybrid plant crosses; while there, she meets mellow-natured John Thatcher, a fellow RA who becomes a collaborator and lifelong friend. As the two progress first through Cornell's botany Ph.D. program and then the bureaucratic labyrinth of research academia, Kate must learn to carve her way through the male-dominated scientific world--pursuing her own experiments without external support; fending off romantic advances from colleagues; contending with theft of her discoveries. In a career that takes Kate from Cornell to the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory to, eventually, the Nobel Prize for her discovery of genetic transposition at the apex of her career--showing that DNA sequences can change their positions in a genome, creating or reversing genetic mutations--Kate learns that a life of the mind is not always compatible with romantic relationships or even comprehensible to the people around her, even those she loves most. This novel, whose protagonist is modeled after Barbara McClintock, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine alone, offers a compelling journey through the frustrating, stymied, yet often fascinating world of scientific innovation. Kate is a satisfying character to root for--stubborn, tender, and occasionally myopic--though some supporting characters are underdeveloped or slot into predictable subplots. Still, Pastan's ability to display the distinctly human side of scientific discovery--its many pitfalls, thrills, and missteps--keeps the novel's heart alive. Engaging and heartfelt. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Inspired by the life of groundbreaking, Nobel Prize--winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Pastan creates an equally indelible character in her heroine, Kate Croft. As a willful young woman in the early 1920s, Kate defies norms by attending Cornell University. She is the lone female in the botany laboratory, and both her professors and colleagues are as impressed by her work ethic as they are resentful of her presence. Though they begin to grudgingly accept her, they are just as prone to steal credit for her discoveries, which they claim as their own, to further their own careers. When she continues to flout convention by remaining unmarried and unimpressed by romantic overtures from the men in her circle, Kate is relegated to eking out a life on the margins of society, defined by her scientific zeal and focused ambitions. Pastan's Kate is feisty, principled, sensitive, and caring, a complex woman competing for recognition in complicated times. Untold-until-now tales of trailblazing women in the sciences capture the popular imagination, and Pastan's novel about determined geneticist Kate Croft is a worthy addition to this compelling and inspiring trend.
