Book Blurb read outloud HERE on our Booktok, we always include the book blurb text in our review post, below. The book is available to buy in Kindle and paperback format, from Amazon.
About the author
Kate Nicholls is an author and former actor who traded the stage to study evoluti onary biology. She raised and homeschooled fi ve children while researching lions in the Okavango Delta. She now lives and writes in Rome
The Maternal Element by Kate NichollsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Time taken to read - in and out as able, 5 days
Pages - 400
Publisher - SALT
Source - Review copy
Blurb from Goodreads
Siberia 1833.
Forty-one-year-old Maria Mendeleeva is enduring her seventeenth pregnancy. Her husband Ivan has lost his sight, and her brother Vasily has left their grandfather’s glass factory in ruins. The factory Maria hungered for as a child. On the brink of poverty and her family’s only remaining hope, Maria must find a way to make the factory viable. She must find the power to bring her grandfather's dreams back to life. She must make the glass sing.
The Maternal Element is a sweeping, gripping epic with an extraordinary woman at its heart. Maria Mendeleeva – mother of Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements – is a heroine like no other. A woman who refuses to be quashed by circumstance, Maria fights against the strictures of her time to gain an education for herself and for her children as she traverses the Urals of Russia seeking opportunity and safety for her family. A vivid and visceral portrait of a woman history has long since forgotten, The Maternal Element is a manifesto for truth, female empowerment and defying societal expectations.
My Review
So I don't know much at all of Dmitri Mendeleeve but know absolutely zero about his family, up bring and indeed his mother. I do enjoy reading people's history especially going back to the 1800's because it is such a different time. This one takes us back to when Maria is just a bairn, what life is like for her desperately wanting everything offered so freely to her brother. Girls are meant to prepare for being married and keeping a home. Maria is like a wee sponge, so inquisitive, wanting to know and learn everything, science in particular, how things work, following her dad about. Her brother is a bit bitter, he hates being forced to go to school and learn. We follow Maria across country, Russia, fighting for her families survival, education, having a voice and actually being listened to in a time where women just weren't, especially back then!
Across a lifetime, navigate grief, love, loss, hardship, survival against so many odds ooft. This is a fictionalised retelling of a true story through letters, vivid imagery and some really emotive, challenging and heart tugging interactions and scenes. The family dynamics, how they love, dislike, push against each other and change and react to the curveballs life throws at them. How love, determination and the force and dedication of one woman who will stop at nothing and for no one to ensure the absolute best for her loved ones. She seemed like an absolute force of nature! In books sometimes when you have timelines that jump about and go back and forth it can be distracting and off putting, add into that letters, however it flows and works effortlessly, 4/5. I really liked this and think I need to look more into this family and their history, this book has definitely peeked my interest and I may well actually learn something!
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