Book Review: The Wives of Los Alamos

May 26, 2015

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The Wives of Los Alamos
Tara Shea Nesbit
241 pages
kindle edition

From the Publisher:
They arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret-including what their husbands were doing at the lab. Though they were strangers, they joined together-adapting to a landscape as fierce as it was absorbing, full of the banalities of everyday life and the drama of scientific discovery. 

While the bomb was being invented, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos gradually transformed into a real community: one that was strained by the words they couldn’t say out loud or in letters, and by the freedom they didn’t have. But the end of the war would bring even bigger challenges, as the scientists and their families struggled with the burden of their contribution to the most destructive force in the history of mankind.

The Wives of Los Alamos is a testament to a remarkable group of real-life women and an exploration of a crucial, largely unconsidered aspect of one of the most monumental research projects in modern history.

Review:
I didn’t finish this book.  I really thought it sounded interesting and I was really hoping it would be an interesting story.  It wasn’t a bad book.  There wasn’t language or subject matter what turned me off, but I just couldn’t get passed the first person plural.  It really drove me crazy.  I just kept wanting the story to start, to have one of the wives tell their story. Honestly, I probably could have stuck it out and finished it, but I just gave up and moved on to another book one day and haven’t looked back.

After reading the book up off and on for a couple days, I skimmed way ahead and found the whole book is like this.  Then I decided to log onto GoodReads.  (Maybe I should have done this first).  I think my favorite review came from Susun, who’s review said this:

“We didn’t like this book. We don’t like stories told in first person plural. We felt this made the story unnecessarily vague and lacking the personalization that would endear the story to the reader. We felt that the author perhaps told the story in this manner to avoid having to be detailed. But we felt that lack of detail lessened the impact of what was taking place. If we had something else to read we would have stopped reading this book after the second chapter. We only have the book an extra star because we have been reading other books on the same subject.”

If you love first person plural than you might really love this story. It’s different than any other book I’ve read.  I just couldn’t get passed it.

Have you ever read a book like this?  Have you read this book?
What were your thoughts?
I don’t have a star score for this book.  Just that I didn’t finish it.


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