The Atomic City Girls

Novel about some people who lived and worked in a secret Tennessee community that supported building the first atomic bomb. Created completely from scratch by the army, Oak Ridge had everything the employees needed- housing, offices, cafeterias, dance halls, movie theaters, roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, and of course the laboratories and other research facilities. Their main goal was making uranium, but the majority of the people who worked there had no idea what they were actually doing. They were forbidden to ask questions or talk about their job- not even among co-workers. Anyone caught breaking the rules was immediately dismissed. As it was a good-paying job in the forties, tons of people flocked to the site for all kinds of positions, from the top scientists, to people manning machines, to those providing meals, doing construction work, cleaning, laundry and so on.

The main characters are two young women from poor families- June is for the most part demure and quiet-spoken, curious about things but trying to do her duty and keep her mouth shut. Her roommate Cici is the opposite- outspoken, flirtatious, intent on re-making her image, lying about her background so she can find a man of higher social status to marry. There are also some chapters from the viewpoints of men- one a scientist, who takes a sudden interest in June, and the other a black man, struggling to deal with the poor housing the army offered its colored workers (freezing in winter, sweltering and swarmed with mosquitoes in summer) and pining for his family, left behind in Alabama. His friends are agitating for better housing, the right to live with their wives, and overall better treatment on the site (they often get ignored and passed up by bus drivers, aren’t allowed into the same recreation halls as white people, and so on).

The storylines of these four different characters eventually intersect at the end of the novel. Mostly it is about how June and Cici experience life at Oak Ridge, June’s curiosity and Cici’s absolute ignorance about what their job is actually doing- June sits all day in front of a bank of dials, instructed to keep them within a certain range, and that’s it. She starts to wonder. When she becomes acquainted with the scientist, and later becomes his girlfriend, she starts to learn more, and to see how the pressure is getting to him. How the excitement of tackling an impossible project turns into horror at its implications, when the euphoria of success subsides. I appreciated that the novel dealt with not only the different aspects of work and living conditions among the varied types of people on the research site, but also their varied responses to what happened when the bomb was finally utilized. There’s a postscript that tells what happened to some of them after. I have to say I didn’t care much for Cici at all, but then I probably wouldn’t have liked her in real life either! The other characters were more interesting to me. The whole story is told in a straightforward, plain writing style that’s not to my usual taste. I certainly learned a lot from this book, though. It intrigued me simply because I knew so little about that era, or the Manhattan project.

Borrowed from the public library.