A review by sarahmkennedy32109
The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

4.0

Ooh my New Mexico book surprised me! The Wives of Los Alamos was a powerful story, one I wasn’t familiar with at all. It’s a historical fiction novel about the women who had to move to Los Alamos when their physicist husbands were enlisted to create the atomic bomb in the 1940s. They were told nothing, not where they were moving to, nor what their husbands would be doing, and were even given new names to go by. Their mail was censored, they could not keep cameras or diaries for the 3 years they lived there, and couldn’t tell their families where in the US they were now living. Just that they were “out west” and had a P.O. Box. For 2-3 years their husbands would go into a warehouse for 8-14 hours a day and never were allowed to tell their wives what they were working on. Until that August morning when the first bomb was dropped. Then they were forced to live with the aftermath of their husband’s involvement and their feelings of either pride or shame or guilt at what they had inadvertently been a part of.
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The powerful thing about this novel is that the entire thing is written in the first person plural. It’s told through the lens of “we.” You never have one main character, in fact very few names are ever mentioned. It took a bit to get used to that but after the bomb is dropped the power of what “we” did and the reckoning of what “we” had to face was striking. This one was an excellent read.