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A review by joeyhannah
The Cassandra by Sharma Shields
4.0
I have complicated feelings about this book. So before I dive into all that, let’s get this one out of the way: I enjoyed it. You definitely should read this book. Now on to my complications.
This book addresses so many issues. Mental illness, the morality of the nuclear arms race, the treatment of women in a male-dominated workforce.
Without the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, I literally wouldn’t exist. My grandmother was in the secretarial pool at Hanford during the war, just like our main character Milly. That’s how she met my grandfather. I found the aspects of the book that discuss daily life in the barracks, on the buses headed out to secret facilities in the desert, the dances, the buses into Richland itself, etc., to be very interesting. It got me thinking about what life must’ve been like for my grandmother. I’ve seen a million photos of Hanford life (check out the Hanford History Project on Facebook), so it helped me to build the bigger picture in my head.
Having grown up in Richland, I have so many conflicting feelings about what they did out there. I went to Richland High (home of the Richland Bombers) during the era when the lettermen’s jackets prominently featured a mushroom cloud on the back, proclaiming “Proud of the Cloud.” I was also still in high school when many folks began shifting focus away from that mushroom cloud and toward the B-17 Bomber, dubbed “The Day’s Pay”, that Hanford employees donated an entire day’s worth of pay site-wide in order to purchase for the war effort.
My grandfather died of emphysema, as did many of the men he worked with out there. I grew up with stories of Grandpa coming home from work in different clothing than he went in, having been exposed to something and having to be decontaminated. Neighbors and friends suffer higher rates of thyroid problems and multiple types of cancers.
I also worked for 10 years at Hanford for one of the contractors involved in cleanup. It’s kind of alarming sometimes to see the end result of that work. To be fair, it was new science and they didn’t know the hazards or the long-term effects of what they were doing. But poor decisions made in waste burial still plague the groundwater, the river, and the entire ecosystem. When a jackrabbit, field mouse, or snake is found in any of the office buildings, it has to be checked with Geiger counters before you can determine how to dispose of it. Even the laborers who clear tumbleweeds off of perimeter fences have to be certified in handling hazardous materials. For tumbleweeds.
It's a crazy place. The cleanup is going to be going on for generations.
And some things about it are still the same. Especially the portrayal of men in the book. You don’t hear much about rape happening, not nearly as much as it would have happened back during the camp days. But the environment of sexual harassment still exists. In my first three years, I was cornered and forcibly kissed against my will twice. And subjected to daily sexual harassment from multiple men. Which is laughed off when reported. And there's still rampant sexism that drives women out of the STEM fields. But each year it’s better. There are more women in positions of authority and respect. But it’s definitely still a boys club. I'm out of it now, but as a woman I have no desire to ever work there again. I definitely look at men much differently than I did prior to working there. Especially "good guys". Because they can be the worst. And they will destroy your reputation with rumor if you think of reporting them. EXACTLY like the sexual harassment in the book.
I did enjoy the magical realism elements. I can’t decide if it’s supposed to be magical realism or mental illness. Maybe a little of both. But I loved the manifestation of the wind and of local animals like coyotes, hawks, snakes. The wind especially. The wind here is insane. Driving during a wind storm is like playing Frogger, but with giant tumbleweeds instead of frogs. So I could see the wind back then driving people crazy. Literally. And the stress of secrecy. Of not knowing what you’re working on.
One thing that I’m sure some locals will take offense to is the prophetic visions Milly has of the aftermath of the bomb. They don’t like to think about it. They want to be “Proud of the Cloud” and heaven help you if you point out that the war was almost over anyway and the horrific maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not strictly necessary. We’ve been arguing over the ethics of it for decades. But it’s an important discussion to have.
So yes, I have complicated feelings about this book. I enjoyed the book. It brought up issues that we’ve struggled with for a long time. I love my home. But there are things I hate about it, too. It’s something I will never be able to resolve. The book is full of big questions. Did we do the right thing? If we didn’t do it, somebody else would have and you don't want that kind of technology in the wrong hands. But it led to the cold war, a buildup of enough firepower to utterly destroy the entire planet many times over, and the utter decimation of the ecology and environment of an entire region. As Milly says, “What if WE are the wrong hands?”
This book addresses so many issues. Mental illness, the morality of the nuclear arms race, the treatment of women in a male-dominated workforce.
Without the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, I literally wouldn’t exist. My grandmother was in the secretarial pool at Hanford during the war, just like our main character Milly. That’s how she met my grandfather. I found the aspects of the book that discuss daily life in the barracks, on the buses headed out to secret facilities in the desert, the dances, the buses into Richland itself, etc., to be very interesting. It got me thinking about what life must’ve been like for my grandmother. I’ve seen a million photos of Hanford life (check out the Hanford History Project on Facebook), so it helped me to build the bigger picture in my head.
Having grown up in Richland, I have so many conflicting feelings about what they did out there. I went to Richland High (home of the Richland Bombers) during the era when the lettermen’s jackets prominently featured a mushroom cloud on the back, proclaiming “Proud of the Cloud.” I was also still in high school when many folks began shifting focus away from that mushroom cloud and toward the B-17 Bomber, dubbed “The Day’s Pay”, that Hanford employees donated an entire day’s worth of pay site-wide in order to purchase for the war effort.
My grandfather died of emphysema, as did many of the men he worked with out there. I grew up with stories of Grandpa coming home from work in different clothing than he went in, having been exposed to something and having to be decontaminated. Neighbors and friends suffer higher rates of thyroid problems and multiple types of cancers.
I also worked for 10 years at Hanford for one of the contractors involved in cleanup. It’s kind of alarming sometimes to see the end result of that work. To be fair, it was new science and they didn’t know the hazards or the long-term effects of what they were doing. But poor decisions made in waste burial still plague the groundwater, the river, and the entire ecosystem. When a jackrabbit, field mouse, or snake is found in any of the office buildings, it has to be checked with Geiger counters before you can determine how to dispose of it. Even the laborers who clear tumbleweeds off of perimeter fences have to be certified in handling hazardous materials. For tumbleweeds.
It's a crazy place. The cleanup is going to be going on for generations.
And some things about it are still the same. Especially the portrayal of men in the book. You don’t hear much about rape happening, not nearly as much as it would have happened back during the camp days. But the environment of sexual harassment still exists. In my first three years, I was cornered and forcibly kissed against my will twice. And subjected to daily sexual harassment from multiple men. Which is laughed off when reported. And there's still rampant sexism that drives women out of the STEM fields. But each year it’s better. There are more women in positions of authority and respect. But it’s definitely still a boys club. I'm out of it now, but as a woman I have no desire to ever work there again. I definitely look at men much differently than I did prior to working there. Especially "good guys". Because they can be the worst. And they will destroy your reputation with rumor if you think of reporting them. EXACTLY like the sexual harassment in the book.
I did enjoy the magical realism elements. I can’t decide if it’s supposed to be magical realism or mental illness. Maybe a little of both. But I loved the manifestation of the wind and of local animals like coyotes, hawks, snakes. The wind especially. The wind here is insane. Driving during a wind storm is like playing Frogger, but with giant tumbleweeds instead of frogs. So I could see the wind back then driving people crazy. Literally. And the stress of secrecy. Of not knowing what you’re working on.
One thing that I’m sure some locals will take offense to is the prophetic visions Milly has of the aftermath of the bomb. They don’t like to think about it. They want to be “Proud of the Cloud” and heaven help you if you point out that the war was almost over anyway and the horrific maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not strictly necessary. We’ve been arguing over the ethics of it for decades. But it’s an important discussion to have.
So yes, I have complicated feelings about this book. I enjoyed the book. It brought up issues that we’ve struggled with for a long time. I love my home. But there are things I hate about it, too. It’s something I will never be able to resolve. The book is full of big questions. Did we do the right thing? If we didn’t do it, somebody else would have and you don't want that kind of technology in the wrong hands. But it led to the cold war, a buildup of enough firepower to utterly destroy the entire planet many times over, and the utter decimation of the ecology and environment of an entire region. As Milly says, “What if WE are the wrong hands?”