By Denise Kiernan
Novel based on true events that happened during WWII. This novels tells the untold story of girls/women who worked in Oak Ridge Tennessee during the war. Oak Ridge was nothing but farmland when the US government stepped in and bought up about 60,000 acres of land to build a city and a series of buildings that would support The Manhattan Project. The city of 75,000 practically grew up overnight as they hired African Americans to build cookie cutter dorms and houses, as scientists built the production site, and as young women were hired to monitor dials and switches for ten hours a day. Since the US had still not recovered from the depression the 75 cents an hour wage was very enticing to young girls who otherwise would have stayed in the homes and become homemakers. What was a shock was that the girls and the whole town had no idea what they were producing–they were told it was their duty to support the war effort and not ask questions or share what they were doing. They were to tell no one–or immediate dismissal. It was brainwashing at its finest but the girls did not really mind because entering the workforce was very exciting to them and in some ways changed the role of women for ever (along with Rosie Riveters of WWII). The only people who knew truly that the atomic bomb was being produced and what it is was capable of were the scientists. Follow the story of CeCe, a sharecropper’s daughter who wanted to find a “rich” soldier, Shirley, a black activist, and June Walker, a simple, shy, naive farmer’s daughter who really didn’t know what she wanted out of life–or what life outside the farm had to offer her.
This book highlights the inequality of women and people of color while engaging the reader in one moment in time when the US was in the race, with Germany, to make a bomb to end war. I did enjoy the content of the book but I just felt the author left a lot of loose ends regarding the inequality issues that she brought forth in this book. Now I am going to try the Atomic City Girls! I love reading novels from this time period.
Reading in the Middle 