Reviews - Bomb (Graphic Novel): The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

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Bomb (Graphic Novel): The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Nick Bertozzi and Steve Sheinkin's "Bomb" may be marketed as a young adult or children's graphic novel detailing the Manhattan Project, but it feels much more adult than the publishers let on. It focuses primarily on the espionage that plagued Los Alamos from its inception and got the USSR the atomic bomb 4 years ahead of where US Intelligence anticipated. This narrative is joined with the production of the bomb and the Norwegian efforts to (successfully) sabotage Nazi heavy water plans.

vekenega's review

4.25

adventurous dark informative reflective tense fast-paced

megan_watson0831's review against another edition

4.0

dark informative sad medium-paced

caitlin_bookchats's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous informative fast-paced

panda_incognito's review against another edition

3.0

The original Bomb book is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction titles, and unsurprisingly, this graphic novel adaptation can't live up to it. It's good, and it will appeal to graphic novel fans, but there are too many people, locations, and scientific concepts involved for this adaptation to work ideally.

This book is very text-heavy, with dialogue pulled from primary sources and imagined based on people's known characters, and much of the dialogue involves scientific discussion that will go over most reader's heads. The story includes explanations of how and why the atomic bomb worked, but someone will need a major interest in and background with science to follow a lot of the dialogue, instead of it just being techno-speak where you know that they know what they're talking about.

This book will appeal to fans of the original work, and to people who are interested in nonfiction graphic novels. However, this graphic novel is definitely not a replacement for the original book. It is much more limited in what it can cover and explain, and also lacks many of the fascinating details of the scientists' everyday life in Los Alamos, focusing on the science element over many of the slice-of-life and group dynamics details that I found so intriguing in the original work.