The Silent Women
The Silent Women follows the life of one woman through the second decade of her life, which straddles the Second World War. Her name is Song Holloway, not because she is Chinese but because her mother is musical. The story begins in Dust Bowl Oklahoma and continues through New England and Tennessee to Song’s early married life in rural north Florida. The high point is her two years at Oak Ridge, the secret city built by the US army in the Appalachian forest to develop the Manhattan Project (the atom bomb).
Oak Ridge was a huge engineering project and unintentional social experiment, bringing together tens of thousands of young people from every part of America and every social and ethnic background. It was isolated, ultra secure, and wrapped in layers of secrecy. Only a very few knew the purpose of their work, although the reader can easily guess.
The most impressive aspect of the book is the depth of Masih’s research, which she conveys to us without info-dumping. She tells you what it is like to live in a Quonset hut and how to grow gladioli commercially, and a lot else. This is a coming-of-age story, not only that of Song but also the dawn of the nuclear age and the post-war world.
