The Radium Girls

May 1, 2020

Gr 7 Up-This dense, meticulously researched book covers the courageous determination of young women who unknowingly poisoned themselves while doing their job. In 1917, the same year the United States entered World War I, dozens of young women, many of them teenagers from working-class families, took up positions at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, NJ. They painted watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint made with radium. This element was still relatively new, and scientists were unaware of how dangerous it was. Moore offers a heartbreaking account of the pain and suffering many of the "radium girls" experienced. Doctors were mystified at their condition, and their employers refused to take responsibility, even discrediting the characters of the girls involved. Moore also explores the story of the women who worked at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, IL. Court cases dragged on for years, plagued by bureaucracy and the powerful corporations' determination to cover up any responsibility they had in the girls' illness. The author does a great job balancing the many court proceedings, reports, and individual profiles of those involved with compelling personal stories of the brave women who suffered the most. The size and depth of the text make this a suitable title for astute older readers. VERDICT An impeccably written but arguably unnecessary young readers' edition of an excellent work of history.-Kristy Pasquariello, Westwood Public Library, MA

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 20, 2017
British ghostwriter Moore traces the lives of more than a dozen American women who were employed as luminous watch-dial painters as early as 1917. She tells how these women, some barely in their 20s, were enchanted by high pay and the allure of the paint’s luminescent substance: radium. Carefully researched, the work will stun readers with its descriptions of the glittering artisans who, oblivious to health dangers, twirled camel-hair brushes to fine points using their mouths, a technique called lip-pointing. By the end of 1918, one out of six American soldiers owned a luminous watch, but the women had begun losing their teeth and entire pieces of their jaws. Moore describes the gruesome effects of radiation exposure on these women’s bodies, and she spares nothing in relaying the intense emotional suffering of their friends and families during subsequent medical investigations and court battles. In giving voice to so many victims, Moore overburdens the story line, which culminates with a 1938 headline trial during which a former employee of the Radium Dial Company collapsed on the stand and had to testify from bed. Moore details what was a “ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment” for worker’s rights; it lends an emotionally charged ending to a long, sad book.

Starred review from July 1, 2020
Grades 4-8 *Starred Review* When radium was discovered as a cancer treatment in the early 1900s, it launched a craze for this miracle element that saw it added to expensive health tonics, ointments, and more. Thus, when the Radium Dial Company opened its doors in New Jersey, giving young working women?most in their teens and early twenties?the opportunity to handle the glamorous substance as dial-painters, meticulously applying luminous radium paint to watch faces, it was welcomed as a boon to the community. In this young readers' edition of her popular adult book, Moore rivetingly sketches the creeping nightmare that was radium poisoning as it worked its way through the women of the U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company, disintegrating their bones and giving them a ghostly (radioactive) glow. She tells this story through the stories of several of the women who were dial-painters, relaying not only their strength of spirit while enduring the pain of their illness but also how they took on the companies that knowingly exposed them to such dangerous work?and lied in the name of profit. A larger narrative of workplace safety and accountability emerges from the wreckage of the radium girls' lives that continues to protect people today. News clippings and period photos enhance the thoroughly sourced text, but it's Moore's personal, captivating prose that renders this shining piece of history unforgettable.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Starting in 1916, young women in New Jersey were hired to paint the luminous dials of watches--with lethal consequences. The young readers' edition of The Radium Girls (2017) pulls no punches. As in the adult version, it describes in agonizing detail the diseases that destroyed the lives of young dial painters who were instructed to "lip point" their brushes with each dip of radium paint. They'd leave work literally glowing, having absorbed such a large quantity of the dangerous radioactive element that they'd been told was good for their health. Moore tracks more than a dozen of the girls through their extreme suffering as the radium loosened their teeth, destroyed their jaws, ate away their bones, and caused lethal tumors. Even after the deadly aftereffects were documented, another company opened a dial-painting studio in Illinois with a similar outcome. Although these young women's lives often ended tragically early, their determination to achieve a legal victory against the negligent companies had lasting consequences: Both important laws that would protect future workers from unsafe employment practices and improve workers' compensation laws and a better understanding of the medical outcomes of radioactivity exposure, which also helped end nuclear tests, resulted. The only discordant note in this sensitive presentation is a single unnecessary, pandering sentence: "Grace recalled that even her boogers became luminously green!" A fine, moving, important work for young readers. (timeline, end notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-18)

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