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Book Reviewed by:From the book jacket: Nancy Zafris follows a colorful cast of characters
into uncharted fictional territory, this time landing in the canyon country of
the desert Southwest in 1954. For motivations as straightforward as striking it
rich to reasons far more complex and confounding, they each embark on very
personal divergent journeys across an unforgiving countryside, even while their
quest to find uranium unites them. By turns meditative and funny, frightening,
witty and refreshingly wise, Lucky Strike explores the ways that language
simply put can mine the inexpressible. In the process, a young widow and her two
children learn much about uranium but even more about the nature of the love
that binds them. This is a story to touch your heart.
Comment: Young widow Jean Waterman is determined to give her seriously
ill 10-year-old son, Charlie, and her 12-year-old daughter, Beth, a summer to
remember. So they head to the Utah desert where uranium fever is at its height -
here they meet a range of quirky characters all united by their obsession to
discover the uranium mother-lode that will make them rich. Zafris
revels in quirky characters and unfamiliar places - her earlier book, The
Metal Shredders was about a bunch of scrap-metal workers in Ohio, while
Lucky Strike revolves around a diverse group of uranium prospectors in the
middle of the Utah desert. This is a bitter-sweet novel, contrasting
upbeat dialogue with Charlie's illness, overshadowed by the effects of uranimum
poisoning (which was unknown to the general public at the time).
In this lovely book, Zafris finds power in the slow, mute strangeness
of everyday anxiety, the blossoming of hope in a barren desert and the
terrible irony of what uranium means to those who seek it.' -
Publishers Weekly.
This review
first ran in the May 22, 2006
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
If you liked Lucky Strike, try these:
by Judy Pasternak
Published 2011
Yellow Dirt offers readers a window into a dark chapter of modern history that still reverberates today, weaving the personal and the political into a tale of betrayal, of willful negligence, and, ultimately, of reckoning.
by Ann Cummins
Published 2008
A story of two families thirty years after the closing of the uranium mill near which they once made their homes. When one of the children becomes involved in a group seeking damages for those harmed by the radioactive dust that contaminated their world, their past and present collide for this eclectic cast of characters.
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