Love, Sex and Mushrooms: Adventures of a Woman in Science is an inspiring memoir of scientific and human love stories.  Author Cardy Raper discovers her passion for science while studying volcanoes at the age of eight. She meets disappointment early in college where science is taught as facts to be memorized. Cardy transfers to a contrasting university and falls in love with her employer and scientific mentor Red Raper. Readers follow their marriage and family throughout the book with one life-changing interruption: Red’s premature death. While devastating at the time, Cardy slowly recasts this robbing misfortune into incentive to make it on her own in the male-dominated world of scientific research—a feat she might never have achieved had Red lived on.
In meeting Red, Cardy simultaneously falls in love with research on fungi. Even before Red’s death, preparation for her solo career began. As Red’s reputation grew, his role as teacher and administrator expanded leaving Cardy to carry out the laboratory research.
Through flashbacks, readers experience the challenges of a mother raising a son and daughter amid two adults’ advancing careers when the concept of women working outside the home was not only rare but taboo.  Her courage and persistence are rewarded: Cardy Raper becomes a world-renowned scientist for whom an honorary retirement symposium drew researchers from all over the world.