Atomic City Girls - Janet Beard

Janet Beard’s The Atomic City Girls offers a poignant exploration of one of WWII’s lesser-known chapters: the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women—nicknamed “Calutron Girls”—who sat behind dials and meters, unaware they were helping build the atomic bomb. The novel follows four narrators—countryside newcomer June Walker, her ambitious roommate Cici, Jewish physicist Sam Cantor, and African‑American laborer Joe Brewer—whose personal trajectories intertwine amid wartime secrecy and moral ambiguity.

Beard skillfully sets the scene of a rapidly constructed community, structured by class, race, and gender hierarchies. Through Joe’s perspective, the novel addresses segregation, prison‑line housing, and under‑recognition, offering one of its strongest and most unsentimental narratives. Meanwhile, June’s arc—from naïve farm girl to someone confronting the weight of complicity—captures the emotional heart of the story. Her romance with Sam begins as escapism, but later becomes a complicated vehicle for truth and hurt, especially as he struggles with guilt and addiction.

That said, the structure is somewhat scattered and the characters underdeveloped. The action switches between stories and points of view too often to get invested in any line. The danger of revelation and punishment is dropped, and the ending wraps up all the stories neatly and artificially.

Despite its promise, the plot leans into soap‑opera dynamics and romance more than the industrial or ethical centrality implied by the title. Still, Beard’s inclusion of period photographs adds immediacy, even if some may find them distracting.

The Atomic City Girls is rich with potential—a historically grounded setting and morally resonant themes—yet it often settles for surface drama over depth. It’s a warm, approachable read, but those hoping for intricate character arcs or deeper insight into Oak Ridge’s secret bureaucracy may feel shortchanged.

Mr. Standfast - John Buchan

John Buchan is most famous for his novel The Thirty-nine Steps which has been adapted for film and television. Mr. Standfast follows the exploits of the same protagonist, Richard Hannay a Scottish engineer, general, and adventurer. He is serving as a general at the beginning of the book, but gets pulled away for a top-secret mission, taking on the undercover role of a pacifist in order to uncover a diabolical, shape-shifting spy. Hannay chases this elusive character all over Scotland and back down into England and finally ends up heading for Switzerland.

It is an elaborate and detailed chase - some of which is dramatic and some of which is slow moving. A number of elements of the tale are connected to previous events and previous characters making it challenging to follow along without taking notes. The story is linked closely to events in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a 1678 Christian allegory. Mr. Standfast is the last pilgrim met by Christiana whom she finds kneeling on the ground and praying “in thanks for having been delivered from the temptation of Madam Bubble”. The Pilgrim’s Progress is used as a code book for passing information, hence the title of this novel.

The time frame of the novel is a bit indeterminate. It was published in 1919 but there is a conspicuous absence of Americans when Hannay returns to the front. Americans entered the war in April of 1917, but Hannay’s beleaguered battalion is relieved by French troops.

This book was appreciated in its time and is interesting from the standpoint of the machinations behind the battles that is far less common than portrayals of face-to-face battles. I didn’t find this book to live up to the promise of the Thirty-nine Steps.

Street - AD Metcalf

Street by A.D. Metcalfe is an extraordinary novel. It’s the story of 12 year-old Johnny Alvarez who runs away from his abusive home in Miami, gets on a bus, goes to New York, and thrives. Johnny is remarkably adept at survival, parking his few belongs in a tree, spending his first night in Central Park, and then establishing himself in a rundown building in Washington Heights. Johnny’s gang builds and gathers momentum as he makes use of his wits and his language skills.

He does have a problem, however. He was so badly abused by his brother in Miami that he periodically blacks out and loses control sort of like the Hulk. It is a gritty, emotionally resonant coming-of-age story, but it is also a a coming-to-terms story as Johnny struggles to get his internal monster under control.

This must have been a challenging book to write just from the standpoint of seeing the world through the eyes of a twelve-year old boy. People do rise to the challenge and behave beyond their maturity, but Johnny is exceptional. There is no youth in him or his world. What sets this novel apart is its psychological depth. Johnny’s internal struggles—particularly the trauma inflicted by his sadistic older brother—are portrayed with raw honesty. The narrative doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of adolescence, but it also offers moments of levity and camaraderie that make Johnny’s journey feel authentic and human 

Metcalfe blends gritty realism with emotional nuance, creating a story that is both harrowing and hopeful. The prose is sharp, the pacing brisk, and the characters vividly drawn. If you're drawn to stories of resilience, urban survival, and the complexities of youth, Street is a compelling and thought-provoking read.

The Rope - Nevada Barr

Published in 2012, The Rope is the 17th Anna Pigeon novel from Nevada Barr. It is the first Nevada Barr novel that I have read, it purports to be the beginning of the Anna Pigeon stories. “It all begins here”, it says on the cover. It’s an interesting beginning.

It's 1995. The story begins at a marina called ‘Dangling Rope’ at the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area with National Park Service personnel hanging around at the end of a work-day. Anna Pigeon is missing from the scene and the reason why she is missing is a mystery. She is mentioned as an odd woman wearing black and saying little.

Anna appears in Chapter 2 at the bottom of a naturally carved ‘solution hole’ in the rocks, naked and with no memory in her fuzz encrusted brain of how she got there, how long she’s been there, or exactly where ‘there’ is. Barr keeps Anna there longer than most readers would feel comfortable with as Anna struggles to figure out her situation and how to escape from it. She cleverly makes use of every option that the situation offers.

Gradually the reader is made aware of Anna’s backstory as Barr shifts the point of view in and out of Anna’s brain as well as the brains of other park employees.

The park employee characters described in the opening chapter are not consistent throughout the rest of the book. A number of traumatic and potentially deadly episodes are strung together to keep the story moving. Barr does a wonderful job of describing the incredible landscapes around Lake Powell and the mysteries of the history of the land that existed before it was all flooded by the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam.

The Rope is a skillful and entertaining tale in the spirit of Paul Doiron and William Kent Krueger.

James - Percival Everett

The foundation of this book derives from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Jim was a slave associated with both Tom and Huckleberry Finn. This book portrays Jim’s life from his point of view - a runaway slave seeking for a way to find his freedom around 1861.

The story begins with Jim chopping wood, stashing a bit away under his mistress’s porch to warm his family’s cabin. He learns that his mistress intends to see him down the river, taking him away from his family. Jim escapes by swimming to a nearby island and his life unravels from there. The book consists of a series of events as Jim moves down and back up the river, from community to community. Everett constructs each event to show the inhumanity showered upon slaves as well as the attitude of the slave toward their ignorant white masters from the slaves use of slave language to having a black man wear black face to sing in a minstrel show.

The story thrives on the irony of the events and situations. The lack of humanity is more than disturbing. A slave is lynched for stealing the stub of a pencil when slaves were not expected to read or write. As Jim transforms to James, his relationship with Huckleberry is clarified.

It is a small world, but some of the interactions seemed contrived - unreal twists of fate. But the book is certainly well written and provides a unique perspective on life.

Code of Arms - Jack Slater

This book confused me. In the early pages, I was pretty sure that it was AI generated. If there is any official way to determine if that is true, I don’t know what it is. Whatever system was used, no obvious typos jumped out at me. That in itself may be indicative of the hand of AI. Interestingly, Amazon lists the publisher as the date of publication.

This is a long shoot-em-up novel. There is a mysterious woman who is subjected to a mysterious beginning in the prologue of the book. When Gideon Ryker appears, he is fighting from his life even though he doesn’t remember who is or how he got into a French Foreign Legion retirement community. It turns out that there is a secret massive conspiracy organization (who Slater claims he based on the people behind Jeffrey Epstein) who wants desperately to silence Ryker – although it wasn’t clear to me why they want to do that. There isn’t much depth to the characters, but there is a lot of bloodshed. Slater seems to have a thorough knowledge of weaponry.

It is written well enough that I read it through. He does a decent job of explaining how Ryker gets from point A to point B, picking up money and clothing and weapons as he goes. And Ryker does seem to have a heart, taking pity on an old man who’s car he steals.

This sort of tale would appeal to readers of Lee Child stories, but Jack Reacher has a greater depth of character than Gideon Ryker.

The Disappeared - C.J. Box

Joe Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming. Like a good protagonist, life isn’t all ‘skittles and beer’ for him. But this book doesn’t begin with Joe Pickett. It begins in the small burg of Encampment, Wyoming where nasty things seem to be going on around the sawmill sawdust burner. It begins with the story of Wylie Frye who is tending to the burner, feeding it sawdust with a bucket loader and checking out messages on his cell phone. The story begins when a truck hits a dog and old Carol Schmidt catches the license plate.

When Joe Pickett enters the story he is waiting for the new governor’s Citation jet at the Saddlestring Municipal Airport. He is met by the governor’s manager who sends him off in a completely unexpected direction to find a missing British PR mogul who has disappeared without a trace. And from there the story marches on through the blinding snow of a Wyoming winter.

There are twenty-six books in the Joe Pickett series and this one was number twenty, published in 2018. Box pushes them out at a rate of one per year. I like the fact that this book stands on its own. Without knowing the details, it makes sense that the story is connected to the preceding Joe Pickett stories, but you don’t have to read them to get to this one.

Joe is a likeable, comfortable, clean living protagonist. He leaves his ugly work to his buddy Nate Romanowski who isn’t adverse to using a frozen trout as a club. Box portrays his characters smoothly and cleanly and the frigid air of the Wyoming winter is abundantly clear and very cold. He reflects the character of his villain through the eyes of a needy side-kick so there isn’t a great deal of depth to him.

But that’s not what the story is about. The story is about Joe Pickett and his family, a dedicated public servant getting his job done despite the barriers of the bureaucracy and the world. And in this book, his job is finding the missing woman. And the reader knows from the beginning that he won’t stop until he gets that done.

The Black Wolf - Samantha Raymer

The Legend of Moonglade - Book One

In a world where everyone has a living spirit animal to accompany them through their lives and bestow them with special powers, superstition prohibits association with just one animal: a black wolf. Zuri, the protagonist of this tale, is a member of the Wolf Clan and when it comes time for a wolf to select her, a black wolf pup chooses her. And so the clan condemns her to growing up as an outcast.

The world of Akaidia has been divided into clans: Wolf Clan, Serpent Clan, Panther Clan, and Hawk Clan. After the Choosing, the black wolf is expelled from the clan and Zuri is shunned, chosen only for the most menial of tasks. But one day outside of the camp, when Zuri is fourteen, the black wolf finds her and they communicate telepathically. When the clan discovers this relationship, she is chased out to the edge of the cliff that hangs over the ocean. Zuri has to choose whether to stay where she is to be killed by the clan or leap off the cliff to what seems like certain death.

Ms. Raymer handles such cliff hangers with skill. She has created the world that has self-destructed under the influence of an evil power that has divided all the people, separated them into warring clans, and spread them apart while the source of the ultimate evil is trapped but growing ever stronger. Ms. Raymer has populated the world with wise teenagers who use their knowledge and the power of their animals to thrive together despite the blindness of the majority of adults.

This is the first novel for this talented thirteen-year-old author. It is an extraordinary start to what promises to be an exceptional artistic ride. It expresses mature writing skills generated from extensive reading, immersion in the world of fantastic tales, determination, and joy in the journey.

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

I don’t need to say it, but John Steinbeck’s writing is masterful. It’s like engaging in a master class in writing. He does break all the rules, and I’m only saying this because it’s how it feels: this book was written by the seat of his pants. It seems to be the work of a pantser from a construction point of view. I didn’t get the sense that there was a great deal of planning in the structure. One idea flows into another and then loops back and weaves together.

Woven throughout are what appear to be autobiographical references. Right from the opening paragraphs he writes in the first person. And then in the fifth chapter he writes about “Olive, my mother.” I have not done the research to know whether or not he actually was writing about his family or if it was just another author’s conceit of bringing reality to the fiction. So the words wander from fiction to apparent reality.

I wanted to read a tale of a truly evil person, but I got the sense that Steinbeck might have been a bit afraid of Cathy Ames. To achieve the true nature of a character, the author has to bring the persona into themselves. Cathy is evil. She starts killing with her parents in childhood and she kills a number of other people throughout the novel, but it seemed to me that Steinbeck didn’t like writing about her. She is a necessary component to the plot, but Lee, Adam Trask’s servant/companion is more developed, substantive, and powerful.

Steinbeck provides a masterful appreciation of the the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants embodied in Lee’s character - right from his shifting Pidgin/English form of speech to the shaving of his pigtail to the remarkable wisdom of his philosophy of life.

Looking for the traditional protagonist/antagonist conflict is a challenge in this book. Once again, Steinbeck breaks the rules. Who is the protagonist in this story? Adam Trask seems to shoulder the role, carrying through from beginning to end. But I can also say that Adam or his soul is the antagonist as well, the element that he is fighting against.

There are a myriad of sub-scenes and character portrayals that paint the colors around the story but do not always impact the movement of the plot.

Steinbeck’s dialog structure is also unique. It is abrupt with few tags to smooth out the changes and it occasionally seems almost innocent or childish in structure which gives it unusual immediacy.

East of Eden is obviously a classic and one that will move to my ‘best books’ shelf as soon as I buy a paper copy.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do you ever experience vellichor — that strange wistfulness of used bookshops? Being surrounded by books that have lived other lives can cause a bit of melancholy. Or have you ever had a jouska — that hypothetical conversation that you play out in your head? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows includes dozens of these spectacular words with equally spectacular definitions such as chrysalism: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.”

Who thinks up these words? I pulled out my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I could find where some of these words came from. I wasn’t successful with the few I tried. Maybe they’re too recent. But wherever they came from, these words would be difficult to throw into the middle of a conversation at a cocktail party. (Do people still have cocktail parties?) I’m experiencing exulansis so I am just going to give up trying to tell my story about swimming across the Atlantic Ocean. People just can’t relate to it!

One of my favorites is Nodus Tollens which is the realization that the plot of your life just doesn’t make sense to you anymore. I mean seriously! How often have you felt that way? In the dictionary there are clues to the derivation.

Directly from the dictionary:

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

From the Swedish ‘eftersom’ because.

agnosthesia

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

From Greek ‘agnostos’ unknown + ‘diathesis’ mood.

Words are amazing! There are so many of them that we’ll never get to know.

The Red Lotus - Chris Bohjalian (Copy)

Genre: Thrillers & Suspense

Chris Bohjalian published The Red Lotus at the very beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic. After reading this book, you have to question whether or not he had an inside track! I’m glad that I read it at the end of the pandemic. (I hope it’s the end. Don’t want to jinx it - as Bohjalian writes about one of the characters at the end of the book.)

Alexis - an ER doctor - and her boyfriend go off to Vietnam on a bike tour. At the beginning of the book she is waiting in the hotel for him to return from a solo ride taken ostensibly to visit sites that were important to his family. But he never comes back. It was a dangerous road. And he probably shouldn’t have been biking alone. But the story is much more sinister than a simple bike accident.

As Alexis begins to learn more about this man, his lies unravel. Her need to know parallels her emergency room character. She could have just left it alone, but she feels the need to hire a private investigator, to contact police sources in Vietnam, and not trust anyone.

The most positive characters in the story are in Vietnam. There is an overlay of the horrible things that Westerners have inflicted on the Vietnamese people.

I had a problem with her insertion into the mysteries of his character because he told her that his father was wounded in battle. And he wasn’t. Would that really have been enough to catapult someone into a cascade of events that resulted in a great deal of death and dying?

And there was a long filler piece about the private eye’s experience in Vietnam during the war that didn’t move the story forward.

On the other hand Bohjalian’s writing is excellent and worth reading. The story is carefully researched and technically well supported. It is a thriller tale that comes way too close to paralleling reality.

Don’t ignore the Epilogue.

Wonderful Words

Sometimes a word in a book looks wrong, like a misspelling, like the copy editor made a mistake. And sometimes it is. But there are a huge number of wonderful words in the English language that we rarely run across. Chirk is a word like that.
“He emerged from the water, surged ahead, and caught up to her. Grabbing her, she chirked, emitting a happy high-pitched squeal.”
Chirk means to make a shrill, chirping sound.
Or how about mephitic: “Some of the players were returning to their cars, lugging bags filled with mephitic athletic attire.”

My son played football in high school and when he would climb into the car with that huge bag of sweaty jerseys and socks and the cowboy collar, the air in the car reeked for days even with all the windows open.
Procacious means insolent or arrogant in attitude or tone. “The twin, sloped, two-color taillights procaciously blended into the small tail fins on either side of the curving top of the tiny trunk, barely large enough to hold the spare tire.” This is part of the description of Jon Megquire’s MG Midget.

These are a couple of excerpts from my latest novel, Death At the Edge of the Diamond. Sometimes these words just seem to appear. Sometimes they come from Roget’s Thesaurus - a truly wonderful reference. I haven’t been able to make an electronic thesaurus work half as well.

Sometimes an author is just showing off and doesn’t truly appreciate the words he or she is messing around with. I might have found a simpler word than procacious, for example, but I was trying to evoke the almost sexual attraction of a first car to a new driver.

Sometimes a word is just wrong, misspelled or misused. A good copy editor will pick up most of these minor typos, but good copy editors are expensive and most self-published authors can’t afford them so unfortunately many hurriedly printed books even from reputable publishing houses have typos in them. Personally I think that this is strongly influenced by fast fingering small keyboards and reliance on auto-correct.

“If you read Death at the Edge of the Diamond carefully you may uncover other interesting words. If you send me what you find, I’ll put you on my list for a free, signed copy of my next book!”

— Paul H. Raymer

Part 3 - Entering The Self-Publishing Jungle

Chances are good that you’re not going to write your novel with a quill pen, dipping it into a bottle of ink, and scratching the letters on parchment. Most people write on computers these days. So how do you do it?

You can use software such as Microsoft Word or something similar. That’s great software with lots of capabilities that most of us never use. (One thing I have found useful is to use the Style menu and convert titles and subtitles into Heading 1, 2, or 3 and then use the Navigation pane. It will automatically make a list of all those elements and when you are ready for a table of contents, it can automatically do all that for you.)

There is writer’s word processing software, however. Now there may be others, but I have been using Scrivener from Literature and Latte https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ . This thing will do everything a writer might need. It does so many things that it takes a bit to get familiar with it. It does have some good tutorials, however.

When I’m working on my novel, I can go to the Notes section and set up a Diary where I can jot down all my developmental thoughts. There are template sheets for Characters and Settings. You can outline sections and pin them to the virtual cork board and more them around. I can load in images of scenes I am working on and put that in the background and remove everything else so I can just focus on the things I am interested in and don’t get distracted. You can save whole web pages in the reference section and download music to play while you’re working. You can set project targets to keep you pushing forward if you need a bit of a shove.

It has great editing features as well that allow you to split the screen while you’re work, cut things out but keep them available in case you want to put them back, and it goes on and on. I confess that I have trouble remembering all the features of the software that I use if I don’t use it every day. But this thing is worth learning and relearning if necessary.

There is a separate Scapple program that allows me to diagram the plot elements and connect them together.

It’s not expensive - $49 for Scrivener and $18 for Scapple. It was originally just for the Mac OS, but there is a Windows version. I bought that too a few years ago but at that time it was as satisfactory. They may have improved it.

And once your draft is complete, you can compile it and move over to Word if you need to. Then you can start cleaning it up for pre-readers to review.

#deathattheedgeofthediamond

#CapeCodNovel

Have you added Death at the Edge of the Diamond to your reading list yet? Check it out and add it to your Goodreads shelf

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54473532-death-at-the-edge-of-the-diamond