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3.35 AVERAGE
3.35 AVERAGE
Interesting quartet of character studies. Learning about what it was like to live in Oak Ridge during WWII was the point of this read for me, and it didn't disappoint. A solid three stars out of five.
novel based around the researching of the atomic bomb during the second world war
DNF June 2018.
I was supposed to read this for book club, but it didn't really engage me right away, and I just couldn't get into it. I read only about 60 pages, but it felt like way more.
I was supposed to read this for book club, but it didn't really engage me right away, and I just couldn't get into it. I read only about 60 pages, but it felt like way more.
I love WWII centred historical fiction. All the stories to be told, it is fascinating. This one was a new angle for me. I thought it sounded really interesting.
Unfortunately it just was very meh. I’m not sure if it was the actual writing or the audio but if it had been a physical copy I would have DNF it early.
The characters were very one dimensional spinal and I didn’t feel a connection to a single one of them. I didn’t believe their connections with each other either
I felt the world building was nearly non existent and could not picture much of the locations.
The issues touched on such as racism, nationalism, sexism and class had so much potential and I just didn’t care much to find out what was going on in these people’s lives and missed all of their struggles entirely.
This book was sadly very much not for me.
Unfortunately it just was very meh. I’m not sure if it was the actual writing or the audio but if it had been a physical copy I would have DNF it early.
The characters were very one dimensional spinal and I didn’t feel a connection to a single one of them. I didn’t believe their connections with each other either
I felt the world building was nearly non existent and could not picture much of the locations.
The issues touched on such as racism, nationalism, sexism and class had so much potential and I just didn’t care much to find out what was going on in these people’s lives and missed all of their struggles entirely.
This book was sadly very much not for me.
I received this book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers in exchange for an honest review.
Unfortunately, I found this book to be very lacking. First off, its title is extremely misleading and is clearly trying to ride the coattails of Denise Kiernan's earlier nonfiction book covering the same events.
Also, there are 4 perspectives and 2 are male--not great for a book allegedly about women. The two women are both heavily reliant on men--Cici is a gold-digger and June has little self-confidence throughout the book. The two women also hate each other through most of the book. I would have preferred a book showing their friendship or June gaining self-confidence through her own initiative. Sam could have been written out entirely in my opinion.
I liked Joe and his storyline though the blurb made it sound like he was going to have a much bigger role. I also would have loved to see Shirley's perspective.
Overall, I found this to be a totally average work of historical fiction. I didn't love it or hate it and I didn't find it particularly memorable.
Unfortunately, I found this book to be very lacking. First off, its title is extremely misleading and is clearly trying to ride the coattails of Denise Kiernan's earlier nonfiction book covering the same events.
Also, there are 4 perspectives and 2 are male--not great for a book allegedly about women. The two women are both heavily reliant on men--Cici is a gold-digger and June has little self-confidence throughout the book. The two women also hate each other through most of the book. I would have preferred a book showing their friendship or June gaining self-confidence through her own initiative. Sam could have been written out entirely in my opinion.
I liked Joe and his storyline though the blurb made it sound like he was going to have a much bigger role. I also would have loved to see Shirley's perspective.
Overall, I found this to be a totally average work of historical fiction. I didn't love it or hate it and I didn't find it particularly memorable.
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
2.5*
This was a slog. It was such an interesting topic but nothing happened in the book. There was no plot whatsoever, other than a series of characters, mostly unconnected, who worked at Oak Ridge. The characters were flat, and honestly a book just about June and her work would have been interesting, but the author chose instead to focus on four characters, and the most boring aspects of their lives. I don’t even know if I could give a summary of this book because there was so little plot...
This was a slog. It was such an interesting topic but nothing happened in the book. There was no plot whatsoever, other than a series of characters, mostly unconnected, who worked at Oak Ridge. The characters were flat, and honestly a book just about June and her work would have been interesting, but the author chose instead to focus on four characters, and the most boring aspects of their lives. I don’t even know if I could give a summary of this book because there was so little plot...
When I was thinking about what to rate this book, I wanted to be kinder to it. After all, the subject matter is incredibly fascinating, and many of my pitfalls can arguably be traced back not to the content of the book, but how it was pitched by the blurb. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that The Atomic City Girls is just not a book I found to be at all interesting. From the very first page to the end of the epilogue, I was bored, frustrated and eager only to get to that point where I didn't have to read it anymore.
Janet Beard attempts to tell the story of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, the USA's World War II research and development programme that resulted in the creation of the first nuclear weapons. Set in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a "secret city" established in 1942 for the very purpose of developing these weapons, Beard follows for characters tied to the project: June Walker, an innocent eighteen-year-old eager to escape her simple home life; her roommate, Cici Roberts, a poor country girl looking to find a wealthy husband no matter what it takes; Sam Cantor, a Jewish physicist who is among the few at Oak Ridge who actually knows what their purpose there truly is and is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the project; and Joe Brewer, a black construction worker whose job at Oak Ridge, though well-paying, separates him from his wife and children.
These characters are some of the blandest portraits I've come across in my reading all year, which is painful because they all have so much potential. June is a curious but naïve young girl whose romantic and sexual affair with the thirty-year-old Sam Cantor provides an opportunity to mature, but she never takes it. Cici, whose desire to marry wealthy makes her unnecessarily cruel at times, could develop from building a genuine relationship with June and having that run in conflict to her ideal life journey, but she abandons that friendship as soon as June does one thing she disapproves of. Sam's bitterness over his work and his self-destructive behaviour could genuinely put his job and future at risk, but any danger that could arrive from his reckless behaviour is never in play. And Joe seems to be thrown into the plot just so that Beard can discuss racism in the 1940s. None of these characters ever becomes more than the one-dimensional archetypes they are introduced as, and it's infuriating.
It's not just the characters that are frustrating, though. The Atomic City Girls consists of 350 pages to tell an engaging story, but the affair between June and Sam that's supposed to drive the plot only starts about 160 pages in. That's almost halfway through the book. And even worse, the relationship clearly starts of as sexual harassment, which June explicitly acknowledges as such—and yet she goes ahead with the affair anyway, for some reason (Sam is attractive, I guess?). The relationship also marks a prime example of Sam's ridiculous behaviour putting his own position at risk, and even though he is in a public space when he first makes a move on June and clearly breaking Oak Ridge rules, nobody ever reports him. So many plot points develop like this, where a character should realistically face the consequences of a foolish decision, and yet somehow that character's acknowledgement of that fact is enough to avoid punishment. Only at the very end of the novel, when the stakes are pretty much non-existent, do any of our characters face the negative aftermath resulting from the things they've done.
Honestly, The Atomic City Girls is a boring book. Although its subject matter holds a lot of promise, the book itself does very little with its intriguing premise that makes it worth picking up. If anyone has any recommendations for fiction revolving around the Manhattan Project and the people of Oak Ridge, I'd love to hear about it. Hopefully, it will help me get this disappointment off my mind.
Janet Beard attempts to tell the story of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, the USA's World War II research and development programme that resulted in the creation of the first nuclear weapons. Set in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a "secret city" established in 1942 for the very purpose of developing these weapons, Beard follows for characters tied to the project: June Walker, an innocent eighteen-year-old eager to escape her simple home life; her roommate, Cici Roberts, a poor country girl looking to find a wealthy husband no matter what it takes; Sam Cantor, a Jewish physicist who is among the few at Oak Ridge who actually knows what their purpose there truly is and is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the project; and Joe Brewer, a black construction worker whose job at Oak Ridge, though well-paying, separates him from his wife and children.
These characters are some of the blandest portraits I've come across in my reading all year, which is painful because they all have so much potential. June is a curious but naïve young girl whose romantic and sexual affair with the thirty-year-old Sam Cantor provides an opportunity to mature, but she never takes it. Cici, whose desire to marry wealthy makes her unnecessarily cruel at times, could develop from building a genuine relationship with June and having that run in conflict to her ideal life journey, but she abandons that friendship as soon as June does one thing she disapproves of. Sam's bitterness over his work and his self-destructive behaviour could genuinely put his job and future at risk, but any danger that could arrive from his reckless behaviour is never in play. And Joe seems to be thrown into the plot just so that Beard can discuss racism in the 1940s. None of these characters ever becomes more than the one-dimensional archetypes they are introduced as, and it's infuriating.
It's not just the characters that are frustrating, though. The Atomic City Girls consists of 350 pages to tell an engaging story, but the affair between June and Sam that's supposed to drive the plot only starts about 160 pages in. That's almost halfway through the book. And even worse, the relationship clearly starts of as sexual harassment, which June explicitly acknowledges as such—and yet she goes ahead with the affair anyway, for some reason (Sam is attractive, I guess?). The relationship also marks a prime example of Sam's ridiculous behaviour putting his own position at risk, and even though he is in a public space when he first makes a move on June and clearly breaking Oak Ridge rules, nobody ever reports him. So many plot points develop like this, where a character should realistically face the consequences of a foolish decision, and yet somehow that character's acknowledgement of that fact is enough to avoid punishment. Only at the very end of the novel, when the stakes are pretty much non-existent, do any of our characters face the negative aftermath resulting from the things they've done.
Honestly, The Atomic City Girls is a boring book. Although its subject matter holds a lot of promise, the book itself does very little with its intriguing premise that makes it worth picking up. If anyone has any recommendations for fiction revolving around the Manhattan Project and the people of Oak Ridge, I'd love to hear about it. Hopefully, it will help me get this disappointment off my mind.
I was really excited to read this book because the topic is so interesting. I also liked the idea of following different characters to learn about how different people experienced life at Oak Ridge. The title, however, seemed a bit misleading because the book seemed to focus on the the male characters, rather than the women at Oak Ridge. I didn't like that the characters didn't grow throughout the story.
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.
If you like Manhattan (TV show) you might like this, but I found the character of Sam became so unpleasant that it killed most of my enjoyment of the book. It does do a very good job of bringing the setting to life.