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A review by teriboop
The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit
1.0
Either this book was a genius piece of work or it was an epic fail. I'm going with the latter. TaraShea Nesbit wrote this book in first person plural which employs writing techniques like "Our husbands did this or they did that". I thought at first that The Wives of Los Alamos was a book about polygamists. I expect the word "or" was used more in this book than the f-bomb was used in The Wolf of Wall Street (569 times, in case you're wondering). This is suppose to be the story of the wives of the men sent to Los Alamos in the 40s to build the a-bomb. You would expect to learn about the lives of the individual women, their families and the heartaches of living in a secretive world during WWII. What you end up with are snippets of the lives of some women, most of whom are unnamed. The reader is offered the different scenarios that happened..."We called our friends from the phone booth and they met us at the train station or at our house with a loaf of bread, or a chicken casserole and a flask." (from the chapter titled "West") These statements are attached to nameless people, giving the reader a chaotic, confused look into their lives. Imagine a scene in a movie where someone's life is flashed before their eyes, you see all these short scenes of their life that are going through their heads. That's what it felt like reading this book, that you were seeing that type of image without any prior knowledge of the people involved.
If the author was out to make you feel as secretive, uncomfortable, and confused at the residents of Los Alamos, then she did her job. However, I never felt connected to or understood anything solid about these people. Names were occasionally dropped but because you never got to know them as individual people, you never knew how anyone felt, how they truly lived and how they were affected by the secret lives they were forced to endure. My feeling toward this book is described in two words: Disconnected rubbish.
If the author was out to make you feel as secretive, uncomfortable, and confused at the residents of Los Alamos, then she did her job. However, I never felt connected to or understood anything solid about these people. Names were occasionally dropped but because you never got to know them as individual people, you never knew how anyone felt, how they truly lived and how they were affected by the secret lives they were forced to endure. My feeling toward this book is described in two words: Disconnected rubbish.