Where the Ground Meets the Sky

Gr 5–8—Twelve-year-old Hazel introduces a period in history with which many students are unfamiliar, and shows in a very personal way how momentous events in history can have wide-ranging and personal effects. Hazel is the incredibly intelligent daughter of a brilliant physicist father and a perceptive and emotional mother. As World War II rages on, the family is suddenly moved from New Jersey to "the Hill" somewhere in New Mexico so that Hazel's father can work with a very elite team on a mysterious "gadget" that will supposedly end the war. Surrounded by a chain link fence and constantly monitored by armed guards, the families in this strange and unattractive town must depend on each other for physical, emotional, and social support. While her father throws himself into work, and Hazel and her new friends try to discover what the mysterious "gadget" will be, her mother withdraws more and more into a small and private world. It is her mother, though, who helps Hazel see that war is not something that is black and white, and that every decision, large and small, can have positive and negative consequences. Emily Durante perfectly voices Hazel's perceptive observations and, without creating individual voices for each character, effectively expresses their personalities in Davies's thought-provoking fictional account (Amazon Children's Pub., 2002) of the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb. This well-done depiction of an inauspicious period of world history will leave listeners with many questions to ponder.—MaryAnn Karre, West Middle School, Binghamton, NY