In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era. In 1941, at seventeen years old, Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone, a brilliant, complicated physics professor who opens her eyes to the fundamentals and poetry of his field, the beauty of motion, space and time, the delicate balance of force and energy that allows a bird to fly. Entranced and in love, Meridian defers her own career path and follows Alden west to Los Alamos, where he is engaged in a secret government project (later known to be the atomic bomb). In married life, though, she feels lost and left behind. She channels her academic ambitions into studying a particular family of crows, whose free life and companionship are the very things that seem beyond her reach. There in her canyons, years later at the dawn of the 1970s, with counterculture youth filling the streets and protests against the war rupturing college campuses across the country, Meridian meets Clay, a young geologist and veteran of the Vietnam War, and together they seek ways to mend what the world has broken. Exquisitely capturing the claustrophobic eras of 1940s and 1950s America, The Atomic Weight of Love also examines the changing roles of women during the decades that followed. And in Meridian Wallace we find an unforgettable heroine whose metamorphosis shows how the women’s movement opened up the world for a whole generation.

So this was an interesting NUBClub. Except for Dan, this book split exactly down gender lines in terms of how you approached it. The men didn't get it. As a story set in Los Alamos during the creation of the nuclear bomb and the subsequent protests, which would be a fascinating setting to explore, it seemed like the book did absolutely nothing with any of that historical content. Meridian witnessed it all, but only in glances from a distance while effectively drifting through her life, vaguely toying with her largely forgotten scientific passion and remaining bonded to her awful, self-centered and neglectful husband. The novel appeared to waste all of its interesting context. The women, on the other hand, loved it and argued that Meridian's lack of voice and participation was exactly the point of the book. They argued that Church was depicting the silencing of a woman, and pointed to the scene in the doctor's office as a clear example of how Meridian did not speak up for herself, and thus was representative of the way women's voices were ignored. The men felt that message was too subtle; the women said that it wasn't and that men who hadn't had that experience probably just couldn't see it. The men at NUBClub took that point, and agreed that the subtle point might have been lost on them, but maintained that would be a flaw of the book. The one thing we all agreed upon was that Meridian's coming into her own at the end of the book was just too pat. The arrival of the perfect, younger, bird-interested hunk was just ridiculous in terms of its convenience. I mean, a love affair that changes someone's life is a bit cheesy just as a plot, but did it actually have to be a vapid, featureless ideal of a love interest? We didn't even know there was such a thing as a manic pixie dream BOY. The end, we agreed, was a cop out to give Meridian a happy ending. Otherwise, we concluded that Church did depict a silenced woman, but whether that was a powerful accomplishment or a wasted opportunity was a matter of opinion.