The Atomic City Girls

Author: Janet Beard
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018
Pages: 384
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: In November 1944, eighteen-year-old June Walker boards an unmarked bus, destined for a city that doesn't officially exist. Oak Ridge, Tennessee has sprung up in a matter of months - a town of trailers and segregated houses, 24-hour cafeterias, and constant security checks. There, June joins hundreds of other young girls operating massive machines who purpose is never explained. They know they are helping to win the war, but must ask no questions and reveal nothing to outsiders.

The girls spend their evenings socializing and flirting with soldiers, scientist, and workmen at dances and movies, bowling alleys and canteens. June longs to know more about their top-secret assignment and begins and affair with Sam Cantor, the young Jewish physicist from New York who oversees the lab where she works and understands the end goal only too well, while her beautiful roommate Cici is on her own mission: to find a wealthy husband and escape her sharecropper roots. Across town, African-American construction worker Joe Brewer knows nothing of the government's plans, only that his new job pays enough to make it worth leaving his family behind, at least for now. But a breach in security will intertwine his fate with June's search for answers.

When the bombing of Hiroshima brings the truth about Oak Ridge into devastating focus, June must confront her ideals about loyalty, patriotism, and war itself.

Review: This book has been on my radar for quite some time, and when "a novel about a historical event" popped up in a reading challenge I'm doing for a Facebook group, it seemed like a good option.

If I have one complaint it's that there are so many characters to follow. However, I believe the author wanted to show life in Oak Ridge from various points-of-view: the women who were taking the place of the men in the workforce since so many were fighting oversees, the scientists, the black laborers, all are represented in this novel. Eventually, it is revealed how all the characters are linked. Unfortunately, character development was lacking.

Where this novel succeeded though was that it brought Oak Ridge to life in a way that a museum exhibit cannot.

Along with actual pictures provided by the Department of Energy, this is an excellent book about a secretive time in American history.

I highly recommend a novel I read a few years ago, The Wives of Los Alamos: same time period, related topic, and really well done.