Genre 5--Book Review 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Klages, Ellen. 2006. THE GREEN GLASS SEA. New York: Viking.
ISBN: 0-670-06134-4

PLOT SUMMARY

Dewey Kerrigan, a science-minded girl, travels alone to meet her father at a secret location “somewhere in New Mexico.” The year is 1943 and the most talented scientists in the United States have gathered together to work on “the gadget,” the invention that will surely end World War II and change the world forever. Dewey enters a town—known as “the hill”-- nameless to anyone except those who live there. After her father is called away, Dewey moves in with the Gordons. Although Terry Gordon, a “lady scientist,” tries to make Dewey welcome, her daughter Suze bristles at sharing her room with “Screwey Dewey.” In the following weeks, however, Suze and Dewey discover a friendship that will comfort them for “the duration.”

One afternoon, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Terry bring devastating news to Dewey. Her father has been killed—just crossing the street. His death is a reminder of the tenuous nature of all life. Several weeks later, July 16, 1945, the “gadget” is tested while Dewey, Suze, and other residents of “the hill” watch the “bright light, as bright as the sun.”

In the final chapter of Ellen Klages novel, THE GREEN GLASS SEA, the Gordons take Suze and Dewey to visit the blast site where they stand at the edge of a sea of green glass—the desert sand melted into “the first new mineral created on this planet in millions of year.”

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Ellen Klages's remarkable novel THE GREEN GLASS SEA chronicles the fascinating story about the building of the atomic bomb. Told in third person narration from the perspective of eleven-year-old Dewey, the author tells a compelling and often disturbing story. Klages places fictional characters beside actual participants in what is known as “the Manhattan Project.” The details in the book portray a convincing sense of realness.

The historical novel is a coming-of-age story that follows Dewey’s young life. As the story opens her grandmother, with whom she had been living, has had a stroke. Dewey doesn’t know her alcoholic mother. Her mother hasn’t seen her in since she was a baby; in an alcoholic stupor she dropped Dewey and the accident left young Dewey crippled. After a blissful year and a half living with her father, he is killed. In spite of everything, the little girl proves to be a survivor. The tragedy of Dewey’s life parallels the complexity of a world with a weapon that threatens to destroy it. She overcomes loss, but the cost is tremendous.

Klages deftly navigates the frightening reality the scientists feel at their success. The atomic bomb promises a quick end to the war but stirs conflicting emotions. Those emotions linger more than sixty years later.

REVIEW EXCERPTS AND HONORS

2007 SCOTT O’DELL AWARD

Review from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, October 23, 2006
Details about the era-popular music, pastimes and products-add authenticity to the story as do brief appearances of some historic figures including Robert Oppenheimer, who breaks the news to Dewey that her father has been killed in a car accident.

Starred Review from BOOKLIST, November 15, 2006
The novel occasionally gets mired down in detail, but the characters are exceptionally well drawn, and the compelling, unusual setting makes a great tie-in for history classes. -John Green

Review from VOICE OF YOUTH ADVOCATES, February 1, 2007
The book is well written, with intelligent characters and understandable descriptions of the place and the work being accomplished. Its well-researched information, including the debate that occurred when the scientists realized what they had created, will appeal to readers of historical fiction.-Cindy Faughnan

CONNECTIONS

Read Paul Zindel’s THE GADGET about the teenage son of another Los Alamos scientist.

For older students, research the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and have them debate the choice that the United States government made.
http://lessons.ctaponline.org/~thampton/

Research Trinitite.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/hiroshimatrinity/trinitite.htm

Create collages like the budding young artist Suze.