The Atomic Weight of Love

Another wonderful love story, that transcends the pages of this book.  Author Elizabeth J. Church has created a novel that explores relationships and personal dreams.  She had this reader thinking about her personal relationships and life expectations even before she reached the end of the book.

This is the story of Meridian Wallace, who comes of age during the war years.  She is turning 17 in 1941, and going off to college as a naive young woman from a sheltered childhood.  As she pursues her degree in ornithology, she is also learning about friendship, men and relationships.  She dates two men, one young and brash, one older and more mature.  She is a very bright young student with a chance to go onto graduate school.  She gives it all up for marriage.  Would things have turned out differently if the Unites States had not entered World War Two at that particular time?  Meridian will never really know.  But what she does know is that along the way she has made many personal sacrifices in the name of love.  As we follow Meridian and her husband Alden Whetstone through their relationship, Meridian follows Alden out to Los Alamos, New Mexico has he advances his career working on the secretive atomic bomb project.

As Meridian enters her 40s she becomes a woman of the 1960s and she explores the world of women's liberation.  She becomes an advocate for women's rights and equality.  Meridian had given up her dreams of post graduate work studying birds.  As she grows she finds ways to feel stronger as the woman she has become.  She returns to studying the birds and she draws parallels between the way different species interact with each other.  " Actually, I thought, the small birds' behavior made perfect sense - they were so low in the pecking order, so vulnerable.  Their predators were bountiful, between the roadrunners, crows, raptors, dogs and cats.  The entirety of a sparrow's world was peopled with threats.  Of course women are flighty, I thought.  We have more predators than men; we have to operate constantly with greater wariness.  Women alone in parking lots can be singled out, mugged, or worse.  Our own mates can beat us, kill us."

She goes as a person finds strength within herself.  Though Meridian does not think this is a story about Los Alamos or the development of the atomic bomb or the war; this reader thinks that is also an important topic touched on in this novel.  We hear the viewpoint of Alden who has helped create the bomb that killed thousands of people and ended a war.  We also meet Clay Griffin, a young man who has returned from fighting in Vietnam.  He puts forth the viewpoint of a pacifist, who felt that he was fighting a war that was unjustifiable.  The reader has a chance to also reflect on her feelings about the dichotomy of these two wars.  This is another great topic to think about in this book.

Lastly there is the great discussion topic of relationships between men and women.  The give and take between a husband and wife.  The equality or inequality of those relationships.  The book gives a discussion group some great jumping off points both about those interactions and how they may have changed from one generation to the next.

Not to be overlooked there is also the wonderful small details in the book.  Each chapter heading is a type of bird.  With a definition that relates to the birds relationships.  One of the chapters, "A Murder of Crows 1. Among the smartest animals on earth, the American Crow is highly adaptable."
What a beautiful descriptive story.