Happily, The Atomic City Girls is also a good read. Beard manages to imbue this well-researched novel with warmth and charm. The book also feels personal rather than academic or dry, maybe owing partly to the fact that the author’s aunt work at Oak Park.
The plot sluggishly moves from November 1942 to 1945, just after the defeat of the Japanese ... The novel, does, however, find some urgency once the first bomb drops on Japan. After it hits, the characters get at least a scrap of the complexity they had been missing for the previous 300 pages ... Maybe her next work will have the urgency, maturity, and detail that The Atomic City Girls struggles to find.
Ms. Beard does a good job of weaving all of her ancillary characters but a few bits do get dropped leaving some unanswered questions. Some significant events happen off site as it were and are simply relayed in a couple of sentences which leaves the reader a bit deflated ... Overall though, I did enjoy the book despite these minor complaints. I found myself quite involved in the story – especially June’s. It has made me want to learn more about what went on in Oak Ridge.
Interest in books and films about women in various science fields is on the rise and Beard takes full advantage of our curiosity by opening the door into the secret world of the men and women working on the atomic bombs during WWII ... While the focus of the story is on a young and curious woman’s adventure, the history Beard unearthed, especially concerning the African Americans working on the periphery of the project, presents a fascinating glimpse into the war.
I wanted to learn what these Atomic City girls did for the project and learned nothing. Instead, I got a doomed, wartime love story crossed with a forced morality tale about the dangers of blindly following orders with an added glimpse at the racial injustices that existed in the day. Were it well-written with compelling characters, it might be easier to overlook the lack of atomic anything in The Atomic City Girls. Instead, I closed the last page knowing this is one I should have DNF’d but was too stubborn to do so.
