The Wives of Los Alamos

Tarashea Nesbit's The Wives of Los Alamos was totally not what I was expecting.  I was expecting a women's fiction novel centering around the wives of the scientists who helped develop the atom bomb.

Instead, The Wives of Los Alamos is written as a collective "we" - an unusual approach.  The more I read, the more I got into this point of view, and was able to appreciate the story Nesbit was telling.  Although The Wives of Los Alamos doesn't tell any one woman's story, it does explain in detail about the way of life in this newfound community - how no one knew exactly where they were moving to when they left their homes, how husbands did not discuss their work with their wives, how the weather was harsh, how their children grew up together. The group of people that were thrown together in this community had some similarities, but also were still unique individuals.

Although I enjoyed The Wives of Los Alamos, which did give me more information about these women, I still long for a true women's fiction novel that tells the story of these women, that has a plot and characters I can grow to love and identify with.