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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.
Chapter Four
Jean and the children accepted his invitation to drive to the
town. Harry dropped the stack of reading material on his front seat onto the
floor. Jean propped her feet on the magazines and old newspapers; when she
looked down her heels had cut into a Life magazine. She picked up a piece
of the cover photo: a pair of intense eyes, darkened almost into a Zorro mask.
She fit the ripped edges to another piece and Greta Garbo stared up at her.
Harry and his International Harvester reminded Jean of something
she had read concerning the ease of finding uranium:
"I'd been driving along the same road to and from work for years. One day I stopped to change a flat tire and became one of the richest men in the state," said a former plumber's helper and one of the state's newest uraniumaires."
When Harry showed up with his flat tire, it was exactly like one of these testimonials in her many ...
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.
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