Michelle Shocklee delivers a thoughtful perspective on human nature and the repercussions of shame in The Women of Oak Ridge. Focusing on Maebelle Willet, a young woman from a coal mining family who answered the call for workers in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee in late 1941, this novel shifts between Mae’s experiences in the secret city and her experience in 1979, when her niece Laurel arrives in Oak Ridge to research those experiences for her dissertation. The memories and questions that Laurel opens up set off an inevitable reaction in her aunt that have consequences beyond anything anyone who knows Mae Willet could imagine.
Secrets have consequences, and Shocklee explores these on several levels in The Women of Oak Ridge. The characters there in both seasons of Oak Ridge are developed with excellent craftsmanship so that they are very real and relevant to the reader. Both the desperate need for secrecy during the war years, as the residents who live and work there are consistently reminded that loose lips sink ships and even your roommate may be a spy, and the lingering effects of the weight that secrecy. Shocklee also develops a rich setting in Oak Ridge, in the mud town that does not appear on any map and is largely unknown to the postal service, and the one where people live in the spaces left behind when the uranium enrichment facilities were left behind after the war. The reader is fully immersed in this setting with these characters and their complexities so that this book could easily be a quick read, but carries a weight that is worth sitting with for a while. The heaviness of secrecy and shame are very carefully and realistically brought to light in the scope of grace and mercy.
The Women of Oak Ridge by Michelle Shocklee is available from your favorite local booksellers or online:
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I received an ARC of this book. It did not influence my review. All opinions expressed here are my own.
