White Sands, Red Menace by Ellen Klages follows The Green Glass Sea, a middle grade book about a lonely young girl, Dewey, whose father is working on the Manhattan Project. In 1946, World War II has ended; Dewey and her foster family, the Gordons, have just moved to scorchingly hot Alamogordo, New Mexico from Berkeley, California. Dewey and Suze, now just barely into their teens, have become best friends who each have their own deep interests: Dewey loves engineering and science, while Suze is a collage artist who loves using found materials.
Spoilers ahead.
Suze’s father is working long hours on what will become nuclear missiles. Suze’s mother is organizing scientists to try and prevent nuclear war, and did not want her husband drag the family with him to White Sands. The conflict between the adult characters is laid out subtly in the background while the narration focuses in closely on the girls’ points of view. Younger readers who might not know a lot about the American postwar years will learn, as the kids do, about the horrors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the German scientists who were taken into the American nuclear program despite having used workers from concentration camps to build their rockets during the war. As an adult reader, I found the slow and often visceral reveals to be extremely effective.
Dewey has been living with the Gordons since her father’s death, but they are not her legal guardians; thing grow more complicated after her grandmother’s death, and the reappearance of her mother, who left when Dewey was a baby. In parallel, Suze worries her mother is becoming closer to Dewey than to her because of their shared interest in science.
At their new school, Dewey is pigeonholed and forced to take Home Economics instead of Shop. Meanwhile, Suze makes friends with a Mexican-American girl, Ynez, and her family and learns more directly about the effects of racism.
Klages is an extraordinary writer, whose characterization and use of significant historical detail is exquisitely skilled. Her books are some of the most immersive I’ve ever read, and I recommend them highly for both children and adults.
