I will confess I'm rather unfamiliar with the original myth, so I can't comment on its faithfulness or any aspects of the adaptation, but even as a story itself it felt... somewhat flat. it's a depressing story, tragedy after tragedy, and everything is written to feel like The Worst feeling you could have in each scene. Melantho's innocence, naivety and trusting nature is far from subtle at the start that simply felt at odds with the world around her such that I found it hard to believe at times. later on, I felt like it was just to make all the subsequent tragedies feel Even Worse as her trauma shapes her. I'm all for depressing books/stories but its lack of subtlety just made it feel too much. it's not helped by the fact so many of the side characters are made out in such a way that Melantho is the victim, or that she's the one in the right and by about the halfway point I found myself rolling my eyes every time some sort of conflict played out between her and another character. there was one scene with her brother where I felt like he was simply like a cartoon villain with line after line of insults thrown at her, as if we didn't get that he was The Bad Guy in that situation. there was little to no nuance in a lot of places and everything being un-subtle just got tiring after a while.

in terms of a queer feminist retelling, it's... fine? the feminist aspect is pretty milquetoast and far from radical in its points; the consistent implication that being a woman is the equivalent of being a slave is distasteful at best to say the least too. the message that I think is supposed to be "empowering" is that "we choose to be happy" and "the past is the past" which I despised. Melantho spends so much hating Penelope or being angry at her that the level of romance they have feels somewhat over the top, and likewise for her and Melanthius' relationship too. it all felt constructed just for The Big Emotional End Scenes and as such it didn't really do anything for me. I can see why people would like it but for me it was just... fine.

The past is the worst but I had so much fun learning about it.

A surprising amount of this book is dedicated to alcohol and Prohibiton, but I don’t say that as if it’s to its detriment; it’s more that in this day and age, with how normalized alcohol can be as an indulgence rather than something that can kill you, that it’s hard to remember it was far more deadly when it was being made under the table and through adulteration of industrial chemicals.

Anyway, strongly, STRONGLY recommend this one as long as medical experimentation (unfortunately including use of animals and lots of discussion about the processing of dead bodies/removal of organs) is something that you can tolerate. Give Alexander Gettler his flowers and due acknowledgement via learning about him and all the work he did. Enjoy the mix of science and true crime that makes this easily consumable.

I went in already knowing these women’s fates and still wasn’t ready for how hard this one hit me. Final Score: 3.9

What Worked Well For Me

This is such an important story and an incredibly moving one. There’s a moment near the end during a courtroom scene where one of the women hears for the first time ever that her condition is fatal and her reaction made me tear up. And, if that wasn’t brutal enough, learning how these radium companies tried to weaponize these women against each other's lawsuits was truly infuriating!

I came away from this book with a much better understanding of how much impact these women had on worker safety. What was strange is I live in one of the states connected to this story and it was only through the epilogue that I learned my state has had a day dedicated to them for over a decade. So far, I haven’t found a single person in my state that knew about Radium Girls Day. While this book can be a very hard read, I think this really shows how important books like this are! I hope more people not only learn about what happened as a whole, but also learn about the individual women who fought so hard to have their stories heard.

I came into this book knowing nothing, but I do feel like I can trust that the author did their research. There were a lot of citations throughout and even though I had trouble tracking a few of them down, I don’t think that’s a reflection of the work - I just don’t know how publicly available some of these documents are (and honestly, I don’t think a lot of them should be publicly available, like the women’s diary entries).

Where It Fell Short For Me

The women’s diary entries ended up being one of my biggest complaints about this book because it wasn’t disclosed until the very end of the book in the author’s note that the author was using their diary entries. So I spent the entire book being frustrated by the “fictionalization” of the women’s daily lives since the diary entries weren’t cited. For example, there is a story where one of the women discovers an acne spot on her cheek and the author proceeds to tell us about how she was thinking about all of the parties this weekend including who was hosting the parties and her anxiety about the acne spot not clearing before the parties. Since the diary entries weren’t cited I still have no idea if this was a storytelling device or something from the woman’s diary directly. My frustration also stemmed from the men's thoughts getting a disclaimer like "he likely said". In hindsight, this makes sense, but if the diary entries had been disclosed at the beginning or cited, I wouldn't have been so frustrated throughout the book.

There was also a strange undercurrent of sexualization around these women that made me uncomfortable, and similar to the diary entry issue, I still don’t know where it was coming from. One example is a passage describing radium dust settling across the women’s bodies in the dark room - lingering on their skin in a way that’s explicitly compared to a lover’s touch - and it left me unsure whether the author was implying that the company men/company doctors around them viewed them this way, if there was documentation that cited this sexualization, or if this was just another storytelling device. There was also a consistent emphasis on how pretty these women were, many of whom were minors at the time. I can see why this might be the case - a lot of this material likely came from obituaries and family interviews, and the radium poisoning was so disfiguring that grieving families may have wanted to remember and emphasize how beautiful these women were beforehand. But even with that context, it sat weird with me, and it was never clear enough where the line was between “this is how she was remembered” vs “this is how the author chose to frame her”.

I found the structure of this book a bit frustrating (even though I don’t have any suggestions on how to change/improve it) because there are a lot of women to keep track of across two different states. At one point the book was following a woman who’d just found out she was pregnant, then shifted topics for a paragraph, then came back to a different woman’s pregnancy and pregnancy loss - and I had no idea who we were talking about. Since I had an eBook, I was able to do a quick search and the new woman we were talking about had only been mentioned briefly once several hundred pages earlier. I can understand the throughline being built (pregnancy complications tied to radium exposure), but issues like this made it even more difficult to keep track of the women. Similarly, there were so many lawsuits going on in different states even with tandem reading this I couldn’t keep them all straight and I eventually just gave up and let the lawsuits mostly blur together in my head. I don’t think the scope should have been smaller - I think all of these women’s stories deserve to be told - but it was a lot to hold in my head at once.

Audiobook Experience

Even though I have some critiques of this book on a prose level the narrator, Angela Brazil, absolutely crushed it! Since the prose was more conversational, their narration style was a perfect match and truly elevated my reading experience. I loved the distinct voices she gave each of the women which helped me keep their story lines a bit straighter in my mind. She also had an almost 1920s transatlantic quality to her delivery - it wasn’t overpowering, but felt like a great tonal match. I would definitely recommend the audiobook in tandem with a physical copy!

My thanks to my local public library for having the audiobook and eBook available for me!! GO SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY!! They are truly the BEST!!

TL;DR

Would I Recommend it? Yes Would I Reread it? Meh - unlikely Would I Continue the Series/Read More From This Author? Yes, but in the future I might check the author’s note first to see if there are things like the uncited diaries. I think I would have enjoyed this book so much more if I had known that up front.

Star Score Breakdown

Personal Enjoyment: 3.75 Overall Execution: 4 Craft & Writing Quality: 4 Research and Credibility: 4 Narrative & Storytelling Craft: 3.75 Final Score: 3.9