Lottie is a bright girl born into a conservative family in a conservative part of the country in the middle of the 20th century. She married her childhood sweetheart and has a daughter but as her marriage falls apart she knows there must be more. Developing as a grad student Lottie experiences the prejudice against women in her field and also suffers a trauma which she struggled to move on from.
There are parts of this book that I loved and parts that I hated! Lottie is sympathetically written but her driving aspect of sex is graphically described and at times far too graphic. I realise that the metaphor of rats is in keeping with the character but there's too much detail. However this doesn't detract from an interesting and slightly addictive novel that is still relatively ' literary'

A promising story of a young woman’s struggle to make it as a scientist which unfortunately failed to deliver. Lottie Hart is a woman trying to succeed in the male dominated world of science. The book, set over 4 decades in the US, tracks her life as a “lady scientist” from troubled teenage years through 2 marriages, children and academic success and failure.

While normally this is the type of book I’d enjoy, there was something (large) missing here which failed to hook me in as a reader. Was it the detailed descriptions of rats being euthanised in Lottie’s laboratory? (I hate rats!) Was it a particularly brutal rape scene? (the sex scenes were also cringeworthy & could have been written by a teenage boy). Was it the stereotypical 2 dimensional nature of many of the characters? (the injured high school football star for whom life has been a disappointment, the brilliant but emotionally stunted academics). Yes, I applaud Lottie’s resilience and her determination to succeed but ultimately there was too much for me to dislike & I sped-read my way through the final pages. Life’s too short to waste on a poor book.
2 🌟from me.

Thanks to @netgalley for this ebook in return for my honest review.

2.5 rounded down

Unfortunately this was a case of expectations set from the blurb not living up to the reality of the novel itself. Artifact takes the scientific meaning of the word ("something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure") to tell the story of a scientist, Lottie, who is researching salivary glands in rats. We follow her life from birth in 1940s to the 1980s when she has children and is in her second marriage, with Lottie's romantic relationships and motherhood forming the majority of the storyline and the focus being on the messiness and randomness of life.

It was the part of the blurb which states that the novel is "a celebration of her refusal to be defined by others' imaginations" which I felt letdown by. The story is fine and I felt mostly engaged throughout, but there were a few random jumps around in timeline and bits where I felt like the reader had been chucked into the situation and lacking facts as to who characters were or why things were happening. The political climate and Lottie's involvement with this felt shoehorned in and awkward too. Her character didn't feel quite as nuanced as I wanted it to be in later sections of the story, and for a novel of this length there was little character development of any other character except Lottie herself.

I wouldn't wish to discourage others from picking this up if the premise sounds appealing, but Artifact just had one too many problems to prevent me from fully enjoying it.

This is a timely novel centred on the life of a woman who wants to work in science. This is in the face of much of her family: Lottie's grandmother is highly supportive but her father and mother are not interested (in different ways): her mother has absented herself in books, her father is convinced shouting will solve his family problems. Her first husband takes persuading that she can work at all (like Olive Kitteridge, the novel jumps around between time periods, so her marital history is not a spoiler). The grind and poverty of doc and postdoc work is well captured. I admired the way the writer was unafraid to write in detail about the grim reality of scientific experimentation, from human anatomy to rats (but as a result, this is a book unlikely to appeal if you find these details hard to read). I come back to the Strout comparison - Lottie is not particularly likeable, but she feels like a real person, with real struggles.
"... name one female composer. It was harder than name one female scientist. It amazed Lottie how much it continued to amaze her that social strictures had crushed women throughout the centuries; some dark part of her assumed that women were inferior, that she was inferior, so her grandmother must have been inferior! And Evelyn! Evelyn inferior!
Consciously Lottie never felt inferior, but now and again she wanted to punch the nearest man."

The cover implies this is more 'literary' (I know, problematic category) than it is - in fact, I felt like this is a book that I have read many times before: a middle-class American woman struggling with the constrictions of mid-C20th gender ideology and her own biology. Pregnancy, marriages, juggling motherhood and career - all important topics but this isn't saying anything new. I was interested in Lottie's scientific research at the start but then it disappears from the story. Nothing made this stand out, I'm afraid, and even the writing is workaday rather than elegant or exciting: the epitome of middle-of-the-road 3-stars.

Intimately told and deeply moving; Heyman's novel is gorgeously written and definitely worth the read, albeit not being a life-changing reading experience.

Artifact by Arlene Heyman is the story of one woman’s dating history, love life, sex life, career in science, experiences as a mother and stepmother.