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Book Reviewed by: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.
Just as she did in her New York Times Notable debut novel, The Metal Shredders, 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.
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)...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Nancy Zafris is the author of two novels, Lucky Strike and The Metal
Shredders (2002), and a book of stories, The People I Know (1990).
She says that she was struck with the idea for Lucky Strike after reading a
Utah guidebook that talked about the 1950s uranium rush, comparing it
to the gold rush a century earlier.
Although the USA government sponsored Uranium Rush is far less well
remembered than the Gold Rush, at the time it was big news. Some
sources claim that more prospectors scoured the Utah deserts during
the mid 1950s than ever invaded California during the rush for gold!
Nancy's currently busy writing a book for her son's 12th birthday, then she's planning to ...
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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.
Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
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