The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church

In her debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, Elizabeth J. Church explores the dreams and sacrifices one makes over the course of a lifetime.  An only child of a widowed mother, Meridian Wallace heads off to the University of Chicago in 1941 with the ambition to study birds, especially crows, and to become an ornithologist. She describes her goals as “to question, to ponder, to ask and to learn.  Education was my drug of choice- classrooms, books, lectures, pushing myself to understand.”  And she does, being accepted into a graduate program at Cornell – one she must defer, however, when she moves to Los Alamos to be with her new husband, Alden Whetstone, a physicist 20 years her senior.  

There, while Alden pursues the study of atomic energy, Meri informally charts the social behavior of crows, describing and drawing the activities of Winged Foot, White Wing and Beacon in her journals. She and her husband grow increasingly distant from each other and with seemingly little in common with the other wives, Meri finds a dear friend in Belle, and a soul mate of sorts in Clay, both of whom assuage her loneliness for a time.  At one point, her mother offers advice, saying, “Happiness is unrealistic? Constant happiness, yes.  Contentment, that‘s realistic.”

Many decades pass, social changes are chronicled, and Meridian ages, but also matures and grows, much like the changing roles for women from the 1940’s through the 1970’s and beyond. The Atomic Weight of Love is an excellent choice for book groups with much to discuss in terms of personal relationships, science, and ethical choices. Church deftly weaves in information about birds, and at the beginning of each chapter she even inserts a brief description of a type of bird (e.g., a charm of hummingbirds, an exaltation of larks, murder of crows) foreshadowing some of the plot elements.

Readers who enjoy The Atomic Weight of Love should also look for titles like The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit and two recently published works of non-fiction: Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt and The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman --  the last is one Meri would certainly embrace. The Atomic Weight of Love is an Amazon Best Book of May 2016.