The Green Glass Sea

On December 2, 1942, the Manhattan Project initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Less than three years later, a group of scientists stood near Alamogordo, New Mexico, to watch the first nuclear explosion. One of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer would later say, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita…Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The work of the Manhattan Project and the explosion of the first atomic bomb does not seem the most likely subject for a children’s book. But in one of the most original and compelling works of historical fiction published in the last ten years, Ellen Klages uses this material in The Green Glass Sea. Focusing on the young people who lived in Los Alamos, the book explores the events as an entire community works on the Manhattan Project. Ten-year-old Dewey Kerrigan knows only that her father is engaged in war work—very confidential war work. But she loves the Los Alamos compound; a budding inventor, she discovers that the dump contains valuable but discarded scientific material. Unfortunately, when her father travels to Washington, D.C., Dewey is forced to move in with another girl, Suze, one of her most notorious tormentors at the compound. Slowly these two build a friendship in this unusual setting—so isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. In this novel Klages explores historical events in a way they can be comprehended by an eleven- to fourteen-year-old child.

All good historical fiction is marked by a sense of story, a sense of history, and a sense of place. This novel has all three—but Klages is particularly brilliant at re-creating the Los Alamos complex. Readers get to know the streets and the residences; you actually feel like you are walking around Los Alamos in 1945, something difficult for any writer to achieve. One young reader recently noted that she read “the book when I was thirteen, I’m fourteen now and I’m still in love with The Green Glass Sea! Great story.” And it is a great story, and an important story, one that takes young people up to the moment in time when the world will never be quite the same again.

Here’s a passage from The Green Glass Sea: