Chemistry lessons

Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some fear her intellect, some the sharp pencil she keeps in her hair, and some the fourteen-inch knife in her purse (because every self-respecting cook uses only their own knives). A whimsical twist of fate led her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamed of studying abiogenesis (the theory of the origin of life from inorganic matter), to television, where she hosts the country's most popular cooking show, "Supper at Six." "Cooking is chemistry," she says. "And chemistry is life. It gives us the ability to change everything, including ourselves." Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter, Madelene, growing up under the watchful eye of a bomb-sniffing dog named Six-Thirty, tries to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer in the school library, and also construct a family tree that must include Calvin Evans, a chemist on the verge of a Nobel Prize, a fairy godmother, a grandfather in a striped prison uniform, and a grandmother hiding from tax police in Brazil....