Galley Talk

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on July 6, 2006 Sign up now!

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/6/2006

Lisa Dugan, children's book buyer at Koen-Levy, talks about a fall favorite.

My Penguin sales rep recommended The Green Glass Sea (Viking, Oct.) to me, telling me how much the reps enjoyed it and chose it as their favorite novel of the list. It's not one of the publisher-proclaimed blockbusters of the fall season, but it's such an interesting read and is just the sort of book that children's booksellers will embrace and handsell. It reminded me of Al Capone Does My Shirts. It is history-in-the-making on a personal level.

Ellen Klages vividly conveys the community of scientists and their families at Los Alamos during the time of the Manhattan Project. And, she does it through the eyes of a very inquisitive, scientifically minded 11-year-old girl named Dewey (you have to read the book to discover her full name, a name only a scientist could love!).

Dewey is a loner, not liked by the other girls, but she doesn't care. She has more important things to do. She loves being with her father (even though he is always working on what they call "the gadget"), and she loves tinkering with mechanical and electrical things. In fact, another girl taunts her for reading The Boy Mechanic. "Why do you have that?" she asks, and Dewey replies, "They didn't make one for girls."

What I really love most about this book is the way the author gives us the feel of both a time and a place. The little personal details of life—how food is rationed, but scientists on the project are important enough to get meat. The smell of the sage and piñon trees in the barren beauty of New Mexico. The friendship of the scientists for Dewey, and their recognition that she was "their kind of girl." And on a bigger level, the fact that for the scientists, this was a theoretical challenge, an exciting problem that didn't have real world ramifications. At least, not until they set off an explosion so powerful that it melted the sand of the desert into the sea-green glass of the title.

I admit, this might not be the kind of book kids will pick up on their own right away, but if someone puts it into their hands, they won't put it down until they have finished it.