This is a pleasant enough romance, but the only thing that lifts it above the usual is its background â the Oak Ridge research facility during WWII's Manhattan Project. It focuses on two young women workers there â June and Cici, who become roommates. Both are from poor backgrounds but Cici has invented a moonlight and magnolia history for herself which, she hopes, will let her land a successful husband and transcend her lower-class beginnings. June meanwhile finds herself increasingly attracted to one of the physicists there â a man who is nearly twice her age and almost her polar opposite in background, education, and religion.
There's also a third plot thread, which is really the most affecting, dealing with the Black laborers who worked at Oak Ridge. It's unfortunate that Beard chose to concentrate on the romance stories rather than on the racial tensions which never really were subsumed in the war efforts. The Black work force lived and labored under truly dreadful conditions, and the efforts of some of them to attain equal pay and housing in many ways fueled the anger and the drive for equal rights that would erupt 20 years later.
I had two major quibbles, even with the romance threads. First, as June and Sam's romance heats up, they become sexually active but worry about her becoming pregnant. It's the 1940s â why the hell didn't Sam just buy some condoms? And second, the shallowly-sophisticated Cici has taken country girl June under her wing, taught her to use makeup and urged her to date, but she suddenly turns a cold shoulder to June when she and Sam become an item. Her inexplicable animosity ultimately leads her to a vicious betrayal which makes no sense at all. Cici by this time has her hooks into an Army officer; it's not like she should be jealous of June, whose romance is floundering in any case by that time.
The book ends with a totally unnecessary epilogue outlining the lives of the major characters after the war, and is another odd choice. One might expect such a summary had the characters been represented as historical figures, but they are fictional constructs, one and all.
Oddly enough, this is the second book I've read recently about scientists working on the project who began to have serious ethical conflicts about it. (âHanna's Warâ by Jan Eliasberg was the other.) Beard does make good use of this internal conflict within the technical team, and provides secondary characters who express a wide range of opinions on the necessity and morality of creating such a devastating weapon.
There's also a third plot thread, which is really the most affecting, dealing with the Black laborers who worked at Oak Ridge. It's unfortunate that Beard chose to concentrate on the romance stories rather than on the racial tensions which never really were subsumed in the war efforts. The Black work force lived and labored under truly dreadful conditions, and the efforts of some of them to attain equal pay and housing in many ways fueled the anger and the drive for equal rights that would erupt 20 years later.
I had two major quibbles, even with the romance threads. First, as June and Sam's romance heats up, they become sexually active but worry about her becoming pregnant. It's the 1940s â why the hell didn't Sam just buy some condoms? And second, the shallowly-sophisticated Cici has taken country girl June under her wing, taught her to use makeup and urged her to date, but she suddenly turns a cold shoulder to June when she and Sam become an item. Her inexplicable animosity ultimately leads her to a vicious betrayal which makes no sense at all. Cici by this time has her hooks into an Army officer; it's not like she should be jealous of June, whose romance is floundering in any case by that time.
The book ends with a totally unnecessary epilogue outlining the lives of the major characters after the war, and is another odd choice. One might expect such a summary had the characters been represented as historical figures, but they are fictional constructs, one and all.
Oddly enough, this is the second book I've read recently about scientists working on the project who began to have serious ethical conflicts about it. (âHanna's Warâ by Jan Eliasberg was the other.) Beard does make good use of this internal conflict within the technical team, and provides secondary characters who express a wide range of opinions on the necessity and morality of creating such a devastating weapon.
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