BOOK REVIEW: The DNA of You and Me by Andrea Rothman @rothmaa @tlcbooktours @wmmorrowbooks #thednaofyouandme

Somber, intense, and deeply thought-provoking, Andrea Rothman’s The DNA of You and Me is the sort of book that left me with a quiet pensive feeling about women, love, ambition, and sacrifice.

About the Book

Emily Apell arrives in Justin McKinnon’s renowned research lab with the single-minded goal of making a breakthrough discovery. But a colleague in the lab, Aeden Doherty, has been working on a similar topic, and his findings threaten to compete with her research.

To Emily’s surprise, her rational mind is unsettled by Aeden, and when they end up working together their animosity turns to physical passion, followed by love. Emily eventually allows herself to envision a future with Aeden, but when he decides to leave the lab it becomes clear to her that she must make a choice. It is only years later, when she is about to receive a prestigious award for the work they did together, that Emily is able to unravel everything that happened between them.

Reflection

I finished The DNA of You and Me more than a day ago and the emotions I felt reading it and through the end have stayed with me. Sometimes a book is so well-written that it brings a stark moment of clarity to my own life that is both uncomfortable and important. (I think this is what the J.D. Salinger may have described as the sound of one hand clapping)

This is not a romance, though it is a story about love. And this is an important distinction to make, I think. A romance implies a certain amount of fun, infatuation, and wooing. A story about love is different from a love story. To me, The DNA of You and Me is truly a story about love, but it is the type of love that feels authentic and without the dramatic flair a novel normally brings.

When Emily meets Aeden in the lab, they don’t immediately click. Aeden is worried about Emily starting rival research within their own lab, and Emily has never really learned how to connect with others. Watching their love develop slowly, as they pushed through genetic research to understand the genes that relate to our olfactory sense, I found the humanization of the dry research lab to be one of the shining points to this book.

Emily herself is compelling, tragic, and root-able. She wears her loneliness like a suit of armor. She I confused over whether she should choose ambition or love. Or more specifically, whether she should choose  her legacy or her happiness.

“The gene will be here 100 years from now. But you and I won’t.”

As I’ve spent the past 24 hours reflecting on the story, I think that the story isn’t even really about choosing career or love. More nuanced, the story to me was about how hard it is to truly understand what we want when we are living it. But also that perhaps it is truly never too late.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for my copy. Opinions are my own.