Excerpt from The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We boarded trains in Philadelphia, or in Chicago, with GIs all looking identical in their dog tags, their black-rimmed glasses, their gosling-short hair. Perhaps it was unpatriotic, but we were annoyed at the GIs who ate before us and delayed our dinners until ten o'clock, and who therefore made our children less manageable. Though we were only twenty-five, we were tired, and we were with our children, who reminded us of what we were tethered to, children who were bored for hours and who pinched and kicked one another. When our children whined, He hit me! She started it! after eight hours on the train we ran out of ways to keep them occupied, and instead we finally just stared out the window as if we were noticing the beige nuances of tan landscapes, which we were not. By the time we arrived we had seen so many mountains they had lost any sense of the majestic.

Or, less frequently, our husbands went with us. They drove us in red Studebakers, in green Oldsmobiles, our backseats filled with clothes, books, children, and the family cat, Roscoe, who meowed for hours. We stopped along the way to visit our parents, who asked repeatedly where we were going, and whom we could not tell.

Our fathers pounded their fists on the table, said, You think we are Nazi spies? Tell us! Our mothers said, Be careful. Or, Write me as soon as you can. And our children got fearful, and cried, Tell them, but we did not tell them, or our children. Later, when our fathers cooled off, when they said, touching our arm, I'm your father, you can tell me anything, we did not tell them where we were going, because we still did not know. We hugged our mothers, pecked our fathers on the cheek, glanced out the window to see our husbands checking the air pressure in the tires. Our mothers understood; our mothers had kept great secrets. We loaded up the children, the cat, and the snacks, and headed west.

Excerpted from The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit. Copyright © 2014 by TaraShea Nesbit. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.