The Green Glass Sea

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Dewey still marveled at the freedom she had on the Hill. In St. Louis, Nana had only allowed her to walk to school and back—four blocks—and no dawdling, because Nana knew just how long it took. It wasn't safe, Nana said. But it was safe here. There were guards, so inside the fence, she could go anywhere she wanted, anytime. Even at night.

Her favorite thing was that no one ever told her she asked too many questions. In the nine months that she'd lived here, Dewey had explored almost every inch of the project, except the parts that were secret and had extra guards. And everywhere she went, there were men just as smart as Papa—or as clever—who would help her figure out how to fix a busted clock or radio or motor, take it apart, and explain how it worked.

It was wrong to think, but sometimes she hoped the war would go on and on and on, so she and Papa could stay here forever.

A READER'S SUPPLEMENT FOR

by Ellen Klages

including an author interview,
classroom resources, discussion questions, and
the author's Scott O'Dell Award speech

Permission to reprint “Talking with Ellen Klages” by Hazel Rochman and selected portions of “Girl Mechanic” by Monika Schröder (Vol. 17 No. 2, November 2007) granted by
Book Links
magazine, published by the American Library Association. For more information about Book Links, visit
www. alaorg/BookLinks
.

THE AUTHOR OF THE GREEN GLASS SEA
TALKS ABOUT HER AWARD-WINNING HISTORICAL NOVEL.
By Hazel Rochman

 

Ellen Klages won the 2007 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for her first children's book,
The Green Glass Sea,
which is set in Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945 and told from the viewpoint of almost-11-year-old Dewey Kerrigan, who joins her father in the isolated scientific community. With her passionate interest in science and mechanics, Dewey is in trouble for not knowing her place as a girl, and her personal story tells the dramatic history without preachy messages. What is the mystery about her dad's war work? What is the “gadget” that he and other eminent scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, are working on? The secrets that drive the plot are about the nuclear weapon that changed the world.

 

 

KLAGES:
That is what we really want out of historical fiction. We want to go there. We don't want to be on the outside looking in. We want the backstage tour. We want to be there as the events of history are unfolding around us. And historical fiction reminds us that history isn't just dates and facts and places. It's people and their lives and stories. Sometimes it's extraordinary people in ordinary times changing the world. And sometimes it's ordinary people in extraordinary times as the world changes around their eyes—how they live, what they do, how they think—we get a new perspective on the present.

 

 

KLAGES:
I probably have a 10-foot-long shelf of books on Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project because there is a lot written for adults. I read Richard Rhodes's
The
Making of the Atomic Bomb.
I was able to find four or five books that were oral histories of people who had lived at Los Alamos as kids or books that some of the wives had written about the domestic experience of being there. I read about the science and the scientists. I had a CD-ROM that had a feature where you could actually walk around wartime Los Alamos and get a sense of “this was here in relation to this. ” And then I went to Los Alamos, which is now just a small town in New Mexico, and walked around. I took notes about where you could see the mountains and a lot of the bigger trees, and I took photographs of the buildings that are still there.

 

 

KLAGES:
One reason is that we ended up not being the good guys. That was a tricky thing for me to deal with, to balance all sides. I think that the people who went to work at Los Alamos went with all good intentions, but, of course, the way it turned out, they changed the world in the most horrible way possible. And a lot of them weren't really aware of precisely what they were creating. Five thousand people worked on the Manhattan Project, and only a fraction of them were in on the exact nature of the “gadget. ” Many scientists didn't know what they had done until they saw the test at Trinity.

 

 

KLAGES:
The atomic bomb scares everybody. It has scared everybody for 60 years, and it's a very diffcult thing to talk about, especially with readers younger than junior high and high school. But it's in the headlines all the time. Kids are seeing the news with headlines talking about secret programs to develop weapons of mass destruction or the fact that we are afraid that Iran or North Korea is going to be a nuclear power. That isn't why I wrote the book, but I think, in hindsight, it's really important to open a dialogue with kids about the fact that we started this and it is the most important thing that happened in the twentieth century, possibly in human history. We made it possible to destroy millions of people with one bomb.

And it's not black and white. It's not like the bad guys have nuclear weapons and the good guys don't. I don't know how many countries at this point have the capability to have an atomic bomb; I think about 17. And we're the only country that has ever used one in an act of war. That's an uncomfortable thing to talk about, but I think it's important to know that the technology has been around for more than 60 years now, and, although everybody's been afraid that somebody is going to actually use an atomic bomb, no one has. That says something about human nature. But I didn't want the book to be about the weapon. I wanted to talk about the scientific process and the curiosity that drove these incredibly brilliant people to interrupt their lives to do this.

 

 

KLAGES:
One of the interesting things for me is that Dewey, who is into science and mechanics, and her classmate Suze, who is a budding artist, are both kids who don't fit in. Suze's reaction is to act out and become very extroverted and kind of the class clown. Dewey is more comfortable being invisible. But art and science, which appear to be opposites, are actually two sides of the same coin. They're both the result of curiosity and exploration and creativity, finding out how the world works, and asking “what if?” And that hearkens back to science fiction, which is a literature of “what if?”

 

 

KLAGES:
I wanted to end it just before the world changed. The reader knows the world changes irrevocably on the next page, but the next page is not a part of my book. In fiction the writer is able to step back and see a bigger picture than the characters can. And the reader knows more about the consequences of atomic energy than anybody in the book. The reader brings a whole lot of experience to the mix. Unlike the characters in the book, the reader knows how World War II ends. The reader knows the gadget is going to be successful, and the reader also knows what happened in the next 60 years.

In discussing the book, it's also unrealistic to talk about the atomic bomb without talking about death. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than a quarter of a million people in August 1945, and death on that level is too large and too abstract to comprehend. In
The Green Glass Sea
, the reader experiences the aftermath of just one death on a very personal level; you can comprehend Dewey's grief.

 

 

KLAGES:
The sequel is set at the beginning of the space age, the cold war, and the atomic age. It takes place in a unique moment in American history, because it's the eye of the storm. Everything has just changed, and everything is about to change again, but those years right after the war are ones of deceptive calm. It's a book about the future—with some people excited about rockets and television, and others afraid that there won't be a future, because of The Bomb. It's about the adolescence of Dewey and Suze, and of our modern world, the beginnings of a lot of what we are still confronting right now.

If you accept that historical fiction is a time machine, then there's one thing you need to know, the one unbreakable law of time travel—you cannot change the past. But I hope when you close the cover of
The Green Glass Sea
and return to your own life, you may discover that the past has changed you.

 

 

 

 

 

Hazel Rochman
is a contributing editor for the Books for Youth section of
Booklist
. She chairs the committee of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The other committee members are Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of
The Horn Book
, and Ann Carlson, English and fine arts librarian, Oak Park and River Forest High Schools.

RESOURCES FOR EXPLORING THE GREEN GLASS SEA
By Monika Schröder

The setting and topic of
The Green Glass Sea
lead to connections with science and social studies content areas. Like the main protagonist, the reader finds out only toward the end of the story what the mysterious gadget is that the scientists are working on. After the successful trial of the bomb, the adults and children discuss the ethical consequences of its use. Dewey, who loves science and lives in a community of scientists, learns that science can be both a curse and a cure. The book ends with the radio announcement about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which provides the perfect springboard for a discussion of nuclear weapons and the ethics of science.