Two leading women in contemporary literature

I recently read these two bestsellers in succession,  stories of striking women who keep the reader spellbound through their journeys.

'Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup' by John Carryrou

'Where the Crawdads Sing' by Delia Owens.

These two books do not have much in common - their tones, setting, mood, characterization are all  poles apart from each other.  The main characters live in different times, different places, and very different circumstances.

Elizabeth Holmes (Bad Blood) is a ruthless egotistic ambitious 21st century tech whiz chasing an unrealistic dream in Silicon Valley.
Kya Clark (Where the Crawdads Sing) is a shy, gentle, abandoned child growing up in a marshland by herself in 1960s, and through prejudice and poverty, educates herself to become a naturalist and author.

But what makes these two women similar is their grit, resilience and uncompromising characters - for better or worse. There is also a sense of vulnerability that ties them together - more obvious in Kya but the underlying insecurities in Elizabeth are easy to read into through her insane urge to dominate and control everyone and everything.

Both characters drew me in to their cores with their intensity and focus, and the determination to stay true to their passion through their struggles, while removing obstacles that come in their way, with no regrets in compromising their ethics heavily while doing so.

 More on these books below for the reader to make their own judgments on Elizabeth and Kya.

Where the Crawdads Sing

"Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother."

 This book is more like a long poem. It is this lyrical fairy tale about the wild, reticent, solitary ‘marsh girl’, and the flora and fauna of the stretch of North Carolina marshland that she calls home, where she grows up all on her own - abandoned by family but embraced by the nature around her.
Reminded me so much about the book Educated- but unlike Educated, the reader can escape the harsh realities of prejudice, poverty, loneliness, vulnerability shadowing Kya’s life as she does herself - by taking her boat out to the waters of the marsh. She immerses herself in the life thriving in the marsh - naming the gulls, collecting feather specimens, shells and flowers, then painting, categorizing and documenting them - not knowing that these would be valuable research material, and pave the path to her becoming a renowned naturalist.
Yes, it is unrealistic that with no formal education and barely any human connection, she not only survives but shines as an author and naturalist. But the beauty of the book is that the reader cheers for Kya, no matter what.
The chapters switch between Kya’s growing up years and a murder trial in her twenties where she is the accused, and the courtroom drama keeps the reader completely engaged until the verdict is out . But in all honesty, this revenge and murder mystery plot is a distraction and the book could have done without it.
The magic of the marsh with its shifting tides and teeming wildlife of herons, fireflies , eagles and the brilliant comparisons that Kya draws between the behavioral patterns of the insects or birds and humans is so poetic that it is enough to hold a reader’s attention.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

 I started reading this book with the expectation of knowing more about Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes - promising this revolutionary solution for multiple disease diagnosis by a single prick on the fingertip drawing a minuscule sample of blood .
I had expected Elizabeth to be a crazy scientific genius with way too much ambition eventually overriding her ethics.
But I didn’t expect her to be a cold blooded, scheming, lying megalomaniac with very little regard for science or ethics right from the beginning.

Yes, she has a vision and is able to sell it to seasoned venture capitalists because of her conviction in her product.
She gets 100s of millions of dollars in funding but is so busy being a corporate boss, focused on creating siloed departments in her company for protecting information, terrorizing her employees to the point of suicide, and never looking into the detail of why her wonder product design is faulty and not delivering results.

In all demos to potential clients she forces her team to fake the results of the blood test, which the device is supposed to analyze and wirelessly transmit but never does. Instead the samples are sent through standard blood analyzers when the clients have left and delayed results sent back citing network problems.
What is amazing is that FDA (!), Senior Defense officials or executives of Walgreens and Safeway (planning to venture into healthcare at the time) fall for these lies and excuses again and again, and she continues to raise funds while her company is falling apart and key researchers are either quitting on their own or terminated by her because of her insecurity about her ´proprietary technology´ and terrible temperament.
 
This insane, incredible story of the rise and fall of a Silicon valley entrepreneur's deceit and fraud is mind boggling to say the least. Parts of it, especially when the author and Wall Street Journalist John Carreyrou goes back to talk about her childhood and her parents (also show offs and conniving characters), are pretty dry and make it hard to hold interest.
But overall, the book is a definite page turner and the reader wants to know more and more about what drives Holmes - the 20 year old Stanford dropout who worships and emulates Steve Jobs, and builds a company on faulty  technology but pushes it successfully to investors and governments around the globe with no fear or remorse.
 
For those who haven't followed the story of Theranos, John Carreyrou's  superb investigative journalism brought Elizabeth Holmes and her scam to light, with the help of many ex Theranos employees who took huge risks to expose the dark story to the media.  
Holmes and her mysterious, flashy, scheming partner Sunny Balwani face federal charges and are awaiting judgment at this time.
 
I think the following lines in the book sum up the essence of Elizabeth Holmes’ complex character, and the improbable rise of Theranos:
“Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.”