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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Tara Lynn Masih’s The Silent Women is set during World War II, when sixteen-year-old Song Holloway lives with her widowed mother in Andover, Massachusetts, after the Dust Bowl drove them east from Oklahoma. As local farming moves toward civilian wartime labor, Song takes a job harvesting strawberries for the McCoy family. Her interest in botany eventually brings an unexpected recommendation from her biology teacher, Mr. Johnson, who believes she is suited to classified government employment. Song accepts a position at the Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee, a guarded community known as Oak Ridge, where each employee learns the portion of the project required for an assigned task. Bound by secrecy about why they were recruited, the people surrounding Song contribute to a project whose larger purpose remains hidden even as its enormous facilities rise around them.
Tara Lynn Masih’s The Silent Women is excellent historical fiction, with Masih doing a beautiful job with period detail across Song’s wartime story. King Field is a wonderful example: the blind aircraft observer identifies approaching planes entirely through engine sound, giving civilian defense a fascinating place in the story. Masih shines in bringing the Kahnawake steel riggers known as Skywalkers into the industrial setting, where they cross the highest beams as a plant rises beneath them. The postwar setting is fully realized through Song’s converted military Quonset hut, with wood crates serving as furniture inside her rural Florida home. Masih captures Florida’s flower industry through gladiolus packing, where laborers measure each stem before shipments leave for northern markets. Intelligently written and beautifully immersive, readers interested in historical fiction will love this book.
