The Atomic City Girls: A Novel

Janet Beard

Feb 2018 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

"The Atomic City Girls is a fascinating and compelling novel about a little-known piece of WWII history."—Maggie Leffler, international bestselling author of The Secrets of Flight

In the bestselling tradition of Hidden Figures and The Wives of Los Alamos, comes this riveting novel of the everyday people who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.

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 whose 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, scientists, and workmen at dances and movies, bowling alleys and canteens. June longs to know more about their top-secret assignment and begins an 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.

Ratings and reviews

Told in four alternating points of view, the story covers a period of approximately 18 months in the secret town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A government-built community focused on the enrichment of Uranium for use in bombs to be constructed in Los Alamos. Secrecy and isolation were the watchwords of this project, and we get a sense of what ‘may’ have been their thoughts. Cici, an uneducated country girl with a mean streak, determination to marry rich and a determination to run over anyone who dared stand in her way. June, a young girl from the local area, following in her sister’s footsteps, with an insatiable curiosity and enjoyment in all of the worlds being opened to her. Joe, a sharecropper from Alabama who left his wife and children behind with hopes for a better life, more money and opportunity. Lastly Sam, a physicist with promise, recruited for that promise to work in the laboratories. Each person is wholly different with differing levels of self-awareness and the ‘end game’ for the project. A segregated town that was growing up by leaps and bounds: Joe’s story takes us through the hazards of a black man navigating the discrimination, continuing to work and ignore the many temptations (moonshine, cards, dice) while reining in the anger and determination of some to claim a double victory (victory in Germany, democracy at home) for those who would wait an additional two plus decades. Joe’s story brought the inequities and potential dangers for those who worked tirelessly with sub-par food, housing and opportunity: while building the complex. What Beard has created is a story of ‘what could have been”, none of these characters are real people, simple amalgams of the many who worked on the project. Bits of interest were often left to feel almost like a footnote, as often the story felt as if it wanted to go in another direction and would suddenly move to a differing point of view. The difficulties of life for everyone were touched on: the lines, the dust, the heat, the strain of secrets: and the huge celebrations at both VE and VJ days, the endless ‘sameness’ of each day for the people, and even the tension that I expected to find with the secrecy were missing for most of the story. Yes, each character provided a bit of emotional reaction from me, yet there were moments where I expected more development of a situation, circumstance or revelation. Not a bad story by any stretch of the imagination, but the multiple points of view muddled everyone’s individual story, none truly concluded or settled until the epilogue for each of them. While I think the attempt was to give a nuanced and interconnected story that brought forth the changes, growth and progress for each character in a way that integrated personal and professional lives, there was a piece missing that failed to bring everything together in a way that I believe was expected. I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via Edelweiss for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.

About the author

Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Janet lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she is teaching writing, raising a daughter, and working on a new novel.