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LaughingOne
Jul 24, 2014LaughingOne rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
When I was six (1955) my family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Los Alamos was still the secret city, but not as secret as during the time of this novel. In the mid 1940s scientists were hand-picked to move to the secret city to work on a secret project. This novel is listed as historical fiction in the library but I think it is also creative nonfiction, for the women portrayed are real, or are compilations of the very real women who followed their husbands, and took their children, to live in this secret place and time for two, three, four years. I found the writing itself terse and impersonal, yet packed with details and information about “every wife”. I got bogged down in the everyday life, the sameness, the loneliness, the inability to connect with the loved ones left behind in the towns and cities these women had left. I loved the descriptions of the land itself; they reminded me of my childhood, of places I grew up in and around, places that meant home to me, even though it didn’t mean home to these wives. Once I got used to the sparse writing style, I liked gathering up the little stories and seeing the bigger picture. I also liked how the story followed women after the bombings of Japan, after the scientists and families were allowed to leave, or stay, and some ideas of what they and their children did later on. In one of the later sections of this book there was a reference to a woman who lived outside Los Alamos, whom some of the wives managed to visit. This part reminded me of a novel I read in university – “The Woman at Otowi Crossing” (1965) by Frank Waters. I highly recommend this novel for those who want to read a more personalized story about living near Los Alamos during the height of its wartime activities, and the woman who was friends with people in the nearby pueblos and with some of the scientists and people of Los Alamos.