I saw this book while I was browsing Netgalley and I was intrigued by the premise. It's billed as Normal People meets The Dropout meets Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. So yeah that got me! I loved Normal People when I read that six years ago, and I know the story of The Dropout after I read Bad Blood a couple of years ago. I haven't read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow yet but I have so many friends who have raved about it and it's a book club choice for this year so I will get to it then. So this book definitely IS kind of those three things all mixed together, and I am very grateful to Penguin Random House for granting me access to it. The book will be published on the 10th of July, so it's a few months away yet, but not that far. I think the hype around this book is going to be a LOT!
I was provided with an electronic copy of the book for review purposes but was not otherwise compensated for this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
The main protagonist of the book is Zoe. She is at university at Harvard when she meets Jack in a Chemistry class. She's instantly intrigued by him, especially when she learns he is the undergrad who is famously working in the lab belonging to an eminent professor, David Li. No other undergrad has the honour. He is almost as smart as Zoe and the two of them face off against each other. Then he drops out, just disappears. He has been working insanely much, and the two make friends and start working on lab stuff together. Zoe has a theory about anti aging and epigenomes (I didn't fully understand the science) and Jack gets the two of them into this lab belonging to a guy called Brenna, and he unlocks something to do with yeast, and basically the two of them think they can extend people's lives by up to fifteen or twenty years.
Both Jack and Zoe start working around the clock and neglecting their classes. They bring other people on board - Jack's roommate Carter, who Zoe goes out with for a long time, and Zoe's brother Alex - and they start looking for investors. They have a start up and venture capitalists are really interested in them, but really they don't have a product. They both drop out of Harvard and then they're living this like very rich life where they can buy whatever they want, and they're working insanely, and the business is like a billion dollar business, but there's no actual thing. It completely reminded me of Elizabeth Holmes and her debacle.
I did feel like the middle dragged a bit but then it picked up a lot. I liked Zoe and her family - her dad is a respected professor and whatever she does it never lives up to him or what her brother has done, which she finds frustrating. She and Jack do have an on again off again thing. Jack is mostly a bit of a dickhead which is completely allowed because he's the science genius etc, but Zoe really does feel in the final third that she also has the science knowledge it's just she's now busy being CEO and can't actually do the lab work.
I did wonder how it was all going to fall apart and I'm glad to say I was pleased with what happened. It is an interesting book and I am intrigued as to what the writer writes next. I'm giving it four out of five.
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