The DNA of You and Me

Starred review from March 4, 2019
This sharp debut from Rothman, a former research associate at the Rockefeller University in New York, sets a bittersweet love story within the cut-throat world of academic research, a great pairing she explores with heart, smarts, and a lot of furtive sex. The novel’s narrator, Emily, a bioinformatician—“a sort of Watson-and-Crick of the new millennium”—details her 12-year effort to discover a groundbreaking “pathfinder” gene at a New York City research lab. But her promising work means that university lab colleague Aeden will get sidelined as he’s grudgingly reassigned from his own project to help with Emily’s project. The pair’s initial animosity—fueled by Emily’s admission that she borrowed Aeden’s research findings—turns to passion, but also forces an emotional and career choice after Emily’s awkward visit to meet Aeden’s family. “People like Emily don’t need other people,” Aeden’s mother bluntly tells him, a conversation that Emily overhears. When she then discovers Aeden’s own duplicitous move to discredit her work, both are forced to take a hard look at their futures. This insider look at the rigors and risks of the competitive world of scientific research is fascinating, but it’s Rothman’s aching study of loneliness, heartbreak and forgiveness that resonate.

Starred review from February 1, 2019

DEBUT Rothman's first novel is a powerful one. As DNA is weaved into a new person via chromosomes from parents, so sequences of events connect and in some cases are dependent on one another for existence, yet the linear course in which these sequences express may irrevocably lock out all other options. Emily and Aeden both come to Justin McKinnon's lab for breakthrough research to catapult their careers; in this process, they grapple with regret, jealousy, sleeplessness, and dignity. Seemingly random yet interconnected circumstances arrive with Emily on the cusp of a breakthrough, and Aeden makes an incredible and irrevocable choice. What he has done for Emily forces her to juxtapose her life's trajectory as a scientist with a breakthrough or not in a decision that leaves little room to blend the possible nuances and combinations of her life's trajectory together. Though we come and go in one another's lives, at various points we are each altered from every meeting. VERDICT Great for readers who would enjoy a surprisingly literary love story set against the clinical, sterile, and cutthroat environment of an academic research lab. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]--Jennifer M. Schlau, Elgin Community Coll., IL

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2019
A debut novel by a scientist that makes the lab feel like a real place, not clueless stage dressing.Emily Apell, a bioinformatician fresh out of graduate school, has taken a job in a neuroscience lab at a famous research university in Manhattan overlooking the East River. She's hoping to discover a "pathfinder gene" that guides neurons to their targets in the olfactory bulb, connecting the brain to the input it needs to create the sensation of smell. (Before writing her novel, Rothman herself was a postdoc and research associate studying the neurobiology of olfaction at Rockefeller University.) Emily's boss likes to pit his postdocs and researchers against one another while forcing them to collaborate. She and a co-worker find themselves drawn together in a confusion of attraction and rivalry that feels like fate. In this cutthroat world of elite neuroscience, Emily must choose between work and love. But why? New York's a big place. Why not find a nice, calm web developer or language arts teacher or dentist who will support her passionate commitment to her career instead of sabotaging it? Or, better yet, a good therapist who can help her let go of her notion that she's incapable of love and recognize assholes when she meets them? Sadly, Rothman doesn't provide Emily with anything so sensible. What she does provide are a vivid sense of place and a well-paced, intelligently constructed story. And if readers may sometimes feel like shaking a little sense into her characters, well, isn't that also true of many of the great romantics of literature (looking at you, Heathcliff and Juliet) as well as--face it--a fair number of one's own friends?The pleasure of this novel lies in Rothman's sincere, straightforward, unpretentious prose wracked with the loneliness of young love.

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February 1, 2019
As Emily Appel is about to receive an important award, she looks back on her early career, when she first arrived at a lab in New York City to do postdoctoral research. She wants to use the lab's DNA database to identify new genes that help control the sense of smell. To her dismay, she discovers that several of her new colleagues are already using the database to look for the same genes; it's her first lesson in the intense competition swirling around scientific research. Emily always believed there was a gulf between her and other people; lab director Justin describes her as so single-minded and ambitious, so alone. But she is thrown off balance by Aeden, another postdoc. Their relationship, while it contains the seeds of something enduring, is complicated by frustration, manipulation, and, ultimately, betrayal. The sciencey parts of the book (debuting author Rothman studied the neurobiology of smell before turning to creative writing) will fascinate some readers but are not too heavy-handed to deter those who will be more interested in the human angle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)