Strong Women Revisited
When I published the post featuring books about strong women, I added a quiz. One blog reader answered all questions correctly! Congrats, Cathy Hill. Several readers sent in their favorite ‘strong woman’ character. Someone named the main character in Lessons in Chemistry. Fortunately, strong women are characters in many of the novels we read now–quite a change from fifty years ago. I have come across three books, two fiction and one non-fiction, that continue the saga of how women have long perservered and often not beem recognized.
A Council of Dolls is written by Native American Mona Susan Power. Power has a personal connection to the book because the story follows three women in her family, raised in three different eras but all dealing with the many injustices Native Americans faced in this country. The dolls in the women’s lives had special meaning to them and helped them along their difficult paths. The August 7, 2023 issue of the New York Times ran a very comprehensive review of the book: www.nytimes.com › 2023/08/07 › books I recommend reading the review to get a better ‘feel’ for the book.
Banyan Moon, by Thao Thai, was a “Read with Jenna” pick in June. This, too, is a generational story of three women. In this book, the women are Vietnamese Americans, beginning with the grandmother who, in the 1960’s , left her homeland to live on the Florida Coast. Her home was known as Banyan House, and it held the family together but also held shocking secrets that helped a mother and daughter heal after the grandmother’s death.
The third book is non fiction and relates closely to the recent movie about J Robert Oppenheimer.
Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of The Women who Helped Win World War II by Denis Kiernan This book caught my attention because it is set in what was then a very secret city nestled in a valley in Tennessee and known as Oak Ridge. It was all part of The Manhatten Project, and the city of Oak Ridge, home to 75,000 people, was not on any map. Women were the primary inhabitants and workers in Oak Ridge, because, of course, the men were fighting in the war. Most of the women had no idea what they were working on, and, if they asked, they were often replaced by someone who was not as curious. They were all working, in some way, on making fuel for the first atomic bomb!
