The DNA of You and Me audiobook

The DNA of You and Me is such a powerful romance novel with amazing topics that Rothman has written within this masterpiece! The way that the Author has merged science with love is astounding beautiful and the details are so interesting, intriguing and humorous! I really enjoyed every page and every act from this book!.The beginning of the book kept me so keen on this book and I wanted to go at the end so much and in the same time I didn't want the story to end! It really gives you so much mixed emotions, it is a page-turner book there we meet Emily a fierce and very smart girl who puts all her heart in the laboratory, she works with passion and the question is will she risk everything she loves for a new romance and how things will go are so dramatically in a perfect order!.The narrative of the book is so engaging and the characters are so lovable and reasonable in some actions, as a debut book I really give it a solid five star and I'm so excited to read more from the Author because she has huge potential to melt science in fiction where we don't see it everywhere! .The tensions between the characters are so intriguing and the way that Rothman has written about a young woman to work in a hard STEM field is very fascinating, there's lots of amazing turns which will explore an interesting and beautiful prose! The choices of Emily are so interesting and I'm sure everyone who reads this epic book will love it because it's an educational and quick novel!

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.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.

3.5 starsI received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. “I don’t think it’s just you, Emily. I think we all feel like mutants in our own way.” In a very strong debut, Rothman gives us a contemporary fiction slice of life story featuring Emily, a daughter of a single father, starting off in the science research community. As a child, Emily had an allergy to cut grass and had to stay indoors in the summer, essentially isolating her from playing around with kids her own age. Raised only by her father as her mother dropped her off as a baby and never looked back, he immersed her a lot in his science work. Trying to isolate the genes that allow us to smell, with hopes of possibly one day fixing anosmia, Emily ends up in a lab rife with personal and job political pitfalls.The story started off with giving us a peak at the ending and then rewinding to show how Emily got where she was. Told completely from Emily's point of view, the story is broken up into parts that worked really well to help conceptually understand where and how Emily is mentally and emotionally at each part. The background on her childhood, reason for not being able to be outdoors, relationship with father, and how this molded her, gave a good emotional impact building block for why her work was important to her and even her feelings toward Aeden, her co-worker and love interest.As this is, what I call, a slice of life story, it is a glimpse into one character's life, they and the other characters don't always act in ways that the reader wants them to. I thought it was interesting how the parallels were there to be drawn between Aeden and Emily's father. Emily mentions similarities between the two and then how she can't quite connect with Aeden the way she wants to, possibly why she very quickly became fixated on Aeden. Aeden was a bit hard to read as we don't get his point of view, did he feel guilt tripped or did his feelings just naturally grow from being around Emily? However, this uncertainty did put the reader in the same boat with Emily and as she seems to struggle overall with human connection; you'll feel it.The science in the story was interesting and if you go in with the desire to soak in this world for awhile, you won't feel overwhelmed or lost. I'm definitely a layman with this field and thought everything was explained and relayed in a clear interesting manner, very few times did I feel maybe some in depth moments could be edited out. I do wish I could have gotten a better feel for Emily and some of the emotional moments could have reached deeper; her relationship with her father seemed like a rich well. I also thought her relationship with her boss Justin could have been explored more.I did think, for a debut, the author had an amazing ease of writing style that flowed well and kept me engaged to keep reading; the pages flew by. However, I ended up feeling like I didn't quite have a solid handle on Emily, her growth emotionally and career wise, was left somewhat open. Competitiveness and relationships in the workplace, why we do the things we do, and destiny versus our own decision making were all leading themes in this story about Emily as she searched for scientific and emotional answers. A slice of life story, where mice hold a lot of the answers. “[...]because at the end of the day science has nothing to do with luck, but with truth, and the truth does not always make one happy.”

Rothman's debut novel is a fierce and eloquent exploration of what it is to be a woman working in #STEM - a scientist in the cut-throat world of cutting edge research and academia. It invites us into the heart and mind of Emily, a character we grow to respect and admire, who is faced with the messy business of a budding romance with a colleague, in the laboratory where she works. Should she allow herself to put all she holds dear at risk, or should she smell a (lab) rat? This one's a powerful literary page-turner.

I read an advanced copy of this novel, which will be released in 2019. It's a real page turner. It's about Emily, a scientist, and her determination and angst, and the humiliations she puts up with to achieve love in her personal life as she tries to fulfill her professional ambitions. I felt I was in her head all along and I couldn't put the book down. The story just keeps getting better and better.

As the wife of a postdoc, so much of this rang true. And not just the Southern blots. The egos, the backstabbing, the constant vying for funding and the cut-throat world of research - really makes you wonder why anyone would go into this field. But Rothman also got the drive, too, the urge to know and understand and Be the First to Publish even if it means countless hours and days and nights and weekends and holidays in the lab, eschewing social niceties and, occasionally, hygiene if it means getting that vital piece of information and making that Breakthrough (the essence of which she also 100% Got).On its surface, the DNA of You and Me is a belligerent romance between two scientists whose careers won't allow them time or space for anything more than a fling, and who fight for it nevertheless. But scratch that surface and all the questions women in science are constantly asking themselves today bubble out: is there time for love when funding is on the line? Is there time for family, is there time for friends, is there time for more? What does it mean to have "both," and what kind of person can succeed in a system built for and maintained by a patriarchy uninterested in life outside of Publish or Perish?Rothman doesn't answer these questions, nor should she, but she doesn't shy from taking a long hard look at them. This novel was refreshingly honest, a quick read, and a deep character study. Science-types and friends of science-types would enjoy it for sure, but I'm pretty certain anybody would.(Bonus: the science is both spot on and not at all confusing - you don't actually need to know how a Western blot works to understand what the characters are trying to achieve, but it's also just really cool to see real techniques used)

The DNA of You and Me is a well-crafted novel and a beautiful love story: about romantic love, love of self, and love of work and purpose. The slow build of tension makes the ending all the more powerful—while I enjoyed it all, for the last third of the book I couldn’t put it down. The main character, Emily, is a strong, rational scientist yet the foreshadowing from the beginning hints that she has regrets, or that not all of her experiences are clear cut. From the second paragraph: “If it is true that things are what you make of them, it can be argued that it was I who got in the way of Aeden’s research, his life, and not the other way around.” Emily is independent and introverted, prepared to get through life alone—rather feels she was born to be alone—so her transformation toward the end of the book is welcome and rewarding. I appreciated the thoughtful prose and the exploration of smell in her scientific research, and the way the author utilized this sensory theme throughout the book in this well-written narrative.

I read an advance readers copy of this captivating novel. A powerful love story about a young woman scientist. Can you have both love and a career? And what if one gets in the way of the other? What would you choose? These are some of the questions faced by Emily, the protagonist of this beautifully written novel. I couldn’t put it down.

This is a beautiful book filled with insight and honesty on everything from love and self-awareness to the cycles of life and the realities of being a woman working in a STEM field. The structure of the narrative is masterful, emerging over the course of the story to reveal itself as entwined strands, mirroring each other's steps in a dance of what is and what could be, of who we are and how we see ourselves. An extraordinary debut, Andrea Rothman's THE DNA OF YOU AND ME is a must-read for 2019.

Intelligent and tender love story from the perspective of a modern career woman. Relevant, engaging, a real page turner!

I received an advance copy of this book and loved it. Great to see science in the forefront of a love story, with realistic portrayals of the long and often unfulfilling work that goes into scientific research. A nuanced exploration of a relationship between two people who don't meet the standard mold of dating, at odds with wanting something "normal." A quick and easy read, but in the end it packs a solid punch that will stay with you.

So pleased to have received an advance copy of this engaging and gripping story. It's hard to get my work done when all I want to do is keep reading it! Great character development, great narrative. And i especially love all that I'm learning about science.

This is a beautiful debut! Heartfelt, wonderfully written, masterful with the scientific content, confident, and evocative. Don’t miss this novel and this writer!

Find this review and others at Carlene Inspired.The DNA of You and Me follows young, gifted Emily as she pursues a career in STEM and seeks the DNA code for the olfactory senses. Emily is fascinated by smell and what makes a scent smell a certain way, she's also fascinated by the different way each human takes in a smell or feels an emotion. Her childhood experiences, spent locked away inside or at her father's lab, is the biggest driving force between her desire to find the right strand of DNA and find a way to separate it. When she joins an elite team of scientists she discovers it isn't all about finding the right DNA, but about publishing it first. The honor, the awards, the promise of an easier career, those things mean more to others. As Emily navigates the competition she finds that her mind drifts to a man rather than to her science.I find it very hard to believe that this novel is Andrea Rothman's debut, it is written so well and captures the difficulties and emotions behind STEM, particularly females in STEM, quite accurately. The DNA of You and Me is an honest look at the choices a scientist must make; whether their life work and friendships, and even the possibility of family, can be achieved at the same time or if one is meant to be alone for life while they fight for recognition. The novel is split, almost 50/50, between Emily exploring personal relationships and Emily's fight to find and separate the correct olfactory code that drives scent for humans. If that sounds like something you won't understand or connect with, you'd be wrong. Andrea Rothman gives just enough information and explanation into the process that, beyond looking up a few words, I could follow the process of breaking down DNA code and the process of developing new genetics for mice fairly easily. It's a fascinating read, one that really delves into the art of balancing ones' work and ones' personal life. While I wouldn't classify The DNA of You and Me as a romance, it does indeed feature a relationship that reads like a coming-of-age life lesson for Emily. I think readers looking for romance will feel this one misses the mark. It isn't as emotional as one expects from a typical romance, however I liked the highlight on Emily's difficulty with relationships. She is a bit socially inept, part of that is her lack of desire to make friends and part of that is her inexperience with others. She is a smart scientist, one who has put her life into learning and her work, and while she feels something she can't quite explain for Aeden, she also doesn't understand human connection at the time of their coupling. Their relationship is more of a fling, their connections taking place in darkened rooms with locked doors and quite often in a way that could be interpreted as forceful. As the book moves forward and Emily ages we see the most character growth in her social connection. Her emotions, her desires, her regrets, become those of a matured women rather than that of a young scientist who has given up the rest of her life for the white walls of a laboratory. While I think this could be off putting for some, for me it read very accurate to some of those I've met while working in a STEM supporting role. The DNA of You and Me was very different than my usual reads and for me, it's a winner. It's a quick read, I was quite surprised by how small the hardback is, but it features a meaningful story. If you're looking to break out of your typical genre or you're a fan of science reads, especially if you're fascinated by STEM and the women who are leaving their mark in the field, I highly recommend you pick this one up. ARC provided.

What a wonderful debut novel! The DNA of you and me opens toward the end of the story, as Emily Apell receives a phone call that she has been given a great award in the scientific community. We then go back in time, to the beginning when Emily first started studying the science of smell (which was honestly fascinating to read about) and learn about the choices she made along the way. As a writer myself, I really appreciated the way each chapter ended—not so much with a cliff hanger, but with a statement that made me stop and think and appreciate what I just read before moving on to the next chapter. A quick and fun read that was also quite educational! Who knew smell could be so interesting!

This is a fascinating novel centered on Emily Apell, a young research scientist laser-focused on her work (the origin of our sense of smell) in a famous research lab. Like Hope Jahren's memoir Lab Girl, Rothman's novel is both a deep dive into the hierarchical world of research science and a meditation on how complicated it can be for a young, fierce woman to stake her own unusual claim in life. Rothman never apologizes for or excuses Emily's sometimes questionable decisions. She also doesn't dumb down the science involved, she simply sets the reader in the lab with Emily, and consequently the reader absorbs information from context, a narrative decision that works beautifully. Switching back and forth in time and playing out against the backdrop of a fraught love affair, The DNA of You and Me absorbed me from start to finish. 

Double pressures – Genetics research and romance in a lab (Manhattan, contemporary times): Plenty of fiction evokes a strong sense of time and place, but we don’t often come across fiction strongly-scented about our sense of smell. Andrea Rothman is perfect for dreaming up a story about genetics researchers seeking the genes responsible for olfaction because she once was one.Richman’s debut novel is as fresh and smart as the cutting-edge research going on at a genetics lab where she used to work (The Rockefeller University). Her invented lab – American University of Science Research (AUSR) – and the real one are located along Manhattan’s East River, where the city is developing a major Life Sciences Corridor. The author was a postdoctoral fellow researching the “oddball” set of genes responsible for our sense of smell – the scientific plot of The DNA of You and Me. There’s some other DNA also strongly-flavoring the prose involving the chemistry of romance between two geneticists – Emily and Aeden.For a novel with a scientific theme, fiction readers need a writer who can disarm non-scientists to make the science accessible. We also need a hook we can all relate to by a writer who can charm us with an engaging plot and pleasing prose. Richman proves she has a literary knack for doing both, translating technical science into layman’s terms ever so gently while entangling it with provocative prose on contemporary issues. Taken together, the novel achieves a double effect: gaining a better appreciation of the importance of a sense we may take for granted, and stirring us to think about what matters most to us in life in terms of our goals, values, and ethical principles.The double helix is a term that refers to the shape of DNA, defined as two strands likened to twisted ladders or staircases. The novel is about the tension between two strands – professional versus personal – both of which twist and turn. This twisting is seen in the sketches of DNA twisted ladders that introduce the novel’s five parts.This image doesn’t do justice to the complexity of what’s involved in identifying “how the olfactory nerves, hundreds of thousands possessing different odorant receptor types, ultimately reached their targets, allowing us to smell.” The plot and characters center around trying to figure out how that complicated genetics and neuroscience works.Emily met Justin at a conference in Chicago, where she grew up and was finishing her graduate studies, having already distinguished herself with science journal worthy publication of her clinical cancer findings. Boldly she told him she was “born to” discover the rare olfactory genes. So at twenty-eight he hired her to do just that. Once on board, Justin (forty) saw his younger self: “so single-minded and ambitious, so alone.”Justin’s judgment of Emily was spot-on. It drives the plot and the serious questions raised. Can a woman like Emily, with her set-in-stone career aspirations and asocial personality (“human company is overrated”) ever be happy with anyone? Is she fated to be alone? What if someone comes along and could be the right person for her, would she be willing to compromise her single-minded professional dedication? How deeply conflicted and risky would that decision be, when Emily cannot even “figure out how to be happy”? Friendless all her life, she really doesn’t know “there’s a purpose to being around other people.” Richman has created a character as odd as the mysterious genes.Enter Aeden, a postdoctoral fellow Emily meets on day one of her new job, the same day she’s landed in New York. “Men rarely noticed me,” she says, though her fiery red hair would seem to negate that perception. In fact, Aeden does notice her but for the wrong reason.Aiden begrudges her because he (and lab partner Allegra) have been working for three years on a project similar to the one Justin hired her for. They knew this but Justin never told Emily. Was this ethical, pitting colleagues against each other? Emily tells Justin if he’d told her she never would have accepted the job. Emily knows something about the fierce competition in science labs.In weighing this ethical question (in a novel that evokes many), we need to factor in that Aeden and Allegra are using traditional lab techniques while Emily is using computers to analyze genetics, a field known as bioinformatics. Justin still should have told her, don’t you think? But all Justin cares about is the race to the top.Emily and Aeden get off to a very bad start and stay entrenched for a long time. Between Emily’s anti-social personality, Aeden’s resentfulness, and their mutual intensity they’re an unlikely pair. Theirs is a slow-to-develop, difficult relationship analogous to the slow pace of complex science research. The novel, though, moves easily, briskly.Science tells us something about human beings so look for double meanings. Start with the novel’s cleverly titled five parts: Part 1, The Wrong Genes, cluing us in on failed research and mismatched colleagues. Part II, A Bridge, applies to DNA structure as well as finding a bridge to allow any relationship to foster between the two central characters. Part III, Recombination, is a genetics term and a way to describe the changing nature of Emily’s and Aeden’s relationship. Part IV, Chimera, also from genetics, describes Emily’s romantic crossroads. Fantasy or not?Emily spent her childhood indoors due to an allergy to the smell of grass, shutting herself off from people, setting a lonely pattern for her future. Her interest in olfactory research was inspired by an allergic condition, but it was also influenced by her father’s work in a chemistry lab.Actually, there’s a more profound origin for Emily’s solitary preferences despite her saying “for no apparent reason, I didn’t like people very much, and did not care to be around them.” Abandoned by her mother when she was a baby, it’s no wonder she doesn’t trust people and has only been attached to the father who raised her on his own. When the novel opens, he’s already passed away.No wonder too that Emily finds comfort in an hermetically sealed profession, enabling and rewarding her for cutting herself off from the outside world. Occasionally, she steps out and into it. When she does, nature fills the prose, giving Emily and us a jolt as to what it might feel like cooped up in a lab for crazy long hours, day and/or night. Experiments are timed; ambition has no time limits.The prose also exudes smells, as Emily is hypersensitive to them. Examples include the “buttery odor” of shampoo, “nicotine on his breath,” the “sea-breeze odor of his T-shirt,” the “rotting fish” odor of a “neuron-staining solution,” and the “mild stench” of the East River. All make the point that smells are tied to memories, good and bad.Emily is 40 when Chapter 1 opens, looking back on 12 years earlier when she worked in Justin’s lab. So while we think we know the ending told in the early pages – she receives the prestigious Lasker award for her “contribution to neuroscience” – as we get into her backstory we realize we have no idea until the end whether she and Aeden reach the target of coming together, mirroring the quest to reaching the targets to explain how we smell.Emily is an unusual woman whose scent will linger.Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)