Book of the day: Laws of Love and Logic by Debra Curtis

Review by

Gill South

New Zealand Listener·

12 Mar, 2026 05:00 PM4 mins to read

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Could Laws of Love and Logic by Debra Curtis be the next Lessons in Chemistry? Photo / Emma Butler

Those looking for the next Lessons in Chemistry – a story of ferociously bright, feisty women holding their own in a man’s world – may have found it.

In Debra Curtis’s Laws of Love and Logic, we meet a cast of smart, stimulating female characters we can get behind
amid a tale of first love gone wrong. The wider story is set over a 40-year period from the 1960s, when women were pushing back on traditional roles.

This is the debut novel by Curtis, a retired professor of cultural anthropology – Bonnie Garmus was 66 when she wrote Lessons in Chemistry – and it explores some similar topics and shares a sense of humour.

Carol Webb is a devout Catholic whose best friends are Benedictine monks at Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island, where her husband (always known as Mr Webb) teaches. She is also a robust feminist who brings up her girls, Lily and two-years-younger Jane, to be critical thinkers.

Unfortunately, Carol isn’t given the full life she deserves, and Lily and Jane are left to grow into young women without her, dealing with this loss in different ways.

Lily, a beautiful, intelligent, curious teen, finds first intense love with a talented high school quarterback, who we only ever know as “the boy”. He helps her deal with her grief, and she helps him expand his horizons. But their story comes to an abrupt finish when a post-graduation summer party on the beach goes horribly wrong.

In the following decades, Lily ends up marrying an older man, Marshall Middleton, a wealthy academic who adores her, and with whom she shares a passion for ornithology. It’s not until the 15th high school reunion that Lily and the boy – now a man – meet again. Lily struggles with her feelings, while still loving Marshall. As time goes on, the novel gradually reveals what happened at that fateful summer party that tore the young couple apart.

While Lily has been living the pleasant, intellectually stimulating life of an academic’s wife, Jane has been making radically different life decisions. Phenomenally intelligent, sexually precocious from an early age, and happiest when working on maths proofs, the adult Jane chooses to waitress while working on problems in her spare time and maintaining an increasingly troublesome drug habit.

Through her cast of interesting women, Curtis has opportunity to discuss social issues, such as those around marriage, sex and gender roles. The sisters are always there for each other. Jane doesn’t judge Lily and her feelings for the boy. “Don’t you have any moral codes?” Lily asks Jane. “Sure,” she says, “just not ones based on shame and control.”

Their stories encompass some key times in social history in the US – Jane judges Lily’s blue-blood mother-in-law because she lunches with conservative family-values activist Phyllis Schlafly, while their mother marched to hear the feminist Betty Friedan speak.

How the Webbs reconcile their faith and their fascination with the scientific world is well-explored – their friendship with the Benedictine monks sustain them through the hard times.

This book is all about the power of first love, what it means to be loyal, the shame women are asked to deal with when they don’t obey moral codes designed to keep them in their place, and how redemption can’t be hurried. There is a clear sense of place in this novel: Curtis lives on Rhode Island and writes fluently and confidently about this special part of the US. The author has no trouble bringing the reader with her, thanks to her captivating characters and intriguing plot line. This is a rich read, heartbreaking, engrossing and intellectually stimulating, that stays with you.

Laws of Love and Logic, by Debra Curtis (Bloomsbury, $32.99), is out now.

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