\nFrom the back cover:<\/b>
\nIt is 1943, and while war consumes the United States and the world, eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan lives with her father in a town that\u00e2\u20ac\u201dofficially\u00e2\u20ac\u201ddoesn’t exist: Los Alamos, New Mexico. Famous scientists and mathematicians, including Dewey’s father, work around the clock on a secret project everyone there calls only \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the gadget.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Meanwhile, Dewey works on her own mechanical projects, and locks horns with Suze Gordon, a budding artist who is as much of a misfit as she is. None of them\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnot J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project; not the mathematicians and scientists; and least of all, Dewey and Suze\u00e2\u20ac\u201dknows how much \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the gadget\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is about to change their lives…
\n
\nReview:<\/b>
\nEleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is used to being apart from her father. She’s been living in St. Louis with her grandmother while he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s off doing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153war work,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but a sudden stroke renders Nana unable to care for Dewey any longer. With the whereabouts of her absentee mother unknown, Dewey is packed up and sent halfway across the country to the officially nonexistent town of Los Alamos, New Mexico where her father is a physicist working on what the residents of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the hill\u00e2\u20ac\u009d refer to only as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the gadget\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but which is actually the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n

Dewey isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like ordinary girls. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fascinated by science, especially radios and other mechanical gizmos, and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make any attempts to fit in. Still, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got a lot of independence on the hill and there are many adults nearby to answer her questions and help with her various projects, so she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reasonably happy, if a little lonely, what with Papa spending most of his time in his lab. <\/p>\n

Her classmate, Suze Gordon, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like ordinary girls, either, but that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop her from trying to get them to like her. Unfortunately, like most awkward preteens in this position (and, believe me, Suze\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s efforts conjured up some depressing sixth-grade memories of my own!), Suze\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attempts to fit in never work out. For a significant portion of the book she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not very likable, and mounts a sullen resistance when, a little over a year after Dewey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arrival on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the hill,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Dewey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad travels to Washington and leaves his daughter in the care of his friends, the Gordons.<\/p>\n

Friendship does not automatically ensue between the two girls, but after Suze undertakes one last attempt to be cool\u00e2\u20ac\u201dvictimizing Dewey in the process\u00e2\u20ac\u201dPresident Roosevelt dies and suddenly she realizes how shameful her behavior has been. Slowly, the girls bond and at this<\/i> point the book finally becomes so good I wished for it to be quite a bit longer! The girls are delighted to finally have someone with whom they can share ideas on their projects\u00e2\u20ac\u201dscientific ones for Dewey and artistic ones for Suze\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand love of geeky pursuits. I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realized how hard it was to be a girl geek in the ’40s! Inevitably, the popular girls get wind of their friendship, and Suze is placed in a position where she must make a choice and makes the right one without a second\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hesitation.<\/p>\n

Alas, all good things must end. Suze\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mother, normally so adept at being a good maternal figure in Dewey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life, completely and utterly fails to realize when Dewey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s upset about something quite significant, leading to a particularly ridiculous bout of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Her sudden doubts about the morality of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the gadget\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are also perplexing; has she not been working on this for years?<\/strike> (Update: See comments below.)<\/p>\n

In the end, I enjoyed The Green Glass Sea<\/i> quite a lot. I liked Dewey all along (though I was less keen on the bizarre shifts in verb tense the narrative underwent when switching to her perspective) and warmed up to Suze eventually. I was immensely glad to learn there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a sequel, White Sands, Red Menace<\/i>, and shall be reading it soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the back cover: It is 1943, and while war consumes the United States and the world, eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan lives with her father in a town that\u00e2\u20ac\u201dofficially\u00e2\u20ac\u201ddoesn’t exist: Los Alamos, New Mexico. Famous scientists and mathematicians, including Dewey’s father, work around the clock on a secret project everyone there calls only \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the gadget.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Meanwhile, … Continue reading “The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages: A-“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,7,76],"tags":[25,69],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-m","category-review","category-the-green-glass-sea","tag-childrens","tag-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/tripletake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}