Where the Ground Meets the Sky - Softcover

Davies, Jacqueline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0761451870 ISBN 13: 9780761451877

Publisher: Skyscape, 2012

Synopsis

It's 1944, and war is raging in Europe and the Pacific. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Hazel is fighting her own battles somewhere in the New Mexico desert. Life has gotten increasingly complicated and lonely since Dad brought Mom and her to live on the Hill, an ugly place surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. A brilliant physicist, he is working hard on the Big Mystery, while poor Mom, who has always believed that secrets are bad for the soul, has retreated into a world of her own. A powerful, fictional account of the development of the atomic bomb, this novel offers young readers no simple answers. It does, however, give them plenty to think about as well as an intriguing story populated by a background cast of some of the most important characters of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Jacqueline Davies is a freelance writer who was inspired to write this, her first book, after reading a collection of oral histories of adults who had been children at Los Alamos during World War II. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts. To learn more about the author visit her Web site: http://www.jacquelinedavies.net/

From School Library Journal

Gr 5-8-Twelve-year-old Hazel introduces a period in history with which many students are unfamiliar, and shows in a very personal way how momentous events in history can have wide-ranging and personal effects. Hazel is the incredibly intelligent daughter of a brilliant physicist father and a perceptive and emotional mother. As World War II rages on, the family is suddenly moved from New Jersey to "the Hill" somewhere in New Mexico so that Hazel's father can work with a very elite team on a mysterious "gadget" that will supposedly end the war. Surrounded by a chain link fence and constantly monitored by armed guards, the families in this strange and unattractive town must depend on each other for physical, emotional, and social support. While her father throws himself into work, and Hazel and her new friends try to discover what the mysterious "gadget" will be, her mother withdraws more and more into a small and private world. It is her mother, though, who helps Hazel see that war is not something that is black and white, and that every decision, large and small, can have positive and negative consequences. Emily Durante perfectly voices Hazel's perceptive observations and, without creating individual voices for each character, effectively expresses their personalities in Davies's thought-provoking fictional account (Amazon Children's Pub., 2002) of the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb. This well-done depiction of an inauspicious period of world history will leave listeners with many questions to ponder.-MaryAnn Karre, West Middle School, Binghamton, NYα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyscape
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0761451870
• ISBN 13: 9780761451877
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224