Luminous: The Story of a Radium Girl - Samantha Wilcoxson - ★★★★.¼
AUTHOR: Samantha Wilcoxson
GENRE: Historical Fiction based on Facts.
RATING: 4.25 stars.
In a Nutshell: The hard-hitting story of Catherine Donohue, one of the women who went against a radium corporation in the 1930s after suffering from debilitating radium poisoning. Nicely written, highly impactful, strongly faith-oriented. Recommended!
Story Synopsis:
1920s. Ottawa, Illinois. Catherine Wolfe (Donohue after marriage) was just nineteen when she got a job with Radium Dial Company as a dial painter. The excellent pay package ensured that she could contribute to her family’s needs. What Catherine, and the other girls employed at the company, didn’t know was that they had signed their death warrants by accepting this job. The paint that made them glow in the dark created unknown and unforeseen health issues, which no local doctor knew how to handle. Catherine, supported by her husband and her colleagues, filed a suit against Radium Dial. This book is her life story.
The story comes to us mostly in the third person limited perspective of Catherine.
The ideal way to begin my feedback would be with the woman who carries the story on her frail yet brave shoulders. Right from the start, Catherine comes across as a shy and goodhearted girl, a loner by nature but not averse to spending some time with her female friends. She has a strong faith in God, and even her extreme suffering didn’t allow her trust in God to waver. I learnt a lot from Catherine about what powerful faith actually means. I don’t know if my belief would have been as strong in a similar situation.
Catherine’s demeanour is also so unlike contemporary fictional female characters who are bolder and more outspoken. As such, seeing her determined to make Radium Dial accountable for the harm it did , searching for doctors and lawyers who would help them, and speaking willingly to the media to highlight their doomed situation – all indicate what an ordinary woman can do when what she loves most is challenged – the future of her family.
Catherine’s husband Tom is better than the hero of any romance book you’ll read. He depicts what true love is all about, taking every word of “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” seriously. Reading their interactions with each other and with their two little children depicts the true extent of the tragedy. After all, it is tough to suffer, but it is almost equally tough to watch your loved one suffer while you feel helpless to do anything. It would be next to impossible to match up to the couple goals set by them.
Reading this book isn’t easy. You either already know or you can guess what’s in store for Catherine and the other radium girls, even if you aren’t familiar with their actual life stories. So when you see them twirling the radium brushes with their lips to achieve the perfect pointy tip for painting, or when you watch them gleefully taking radium paint home to colour their nails to make them glow, you feel a combination of dread and fury, knowing that the radioactive element will soon eat away their bones from within. The whole experience is as horrifying to read as it must have been to the girls who watched their bodies disintegrate without knowing why. As I squirmed in discomfort and frustration reading about their lives, I couldn’t stop imagining the immense pain these poor women went through during their last days.
The story played out in my head like an old B&W movie, thanks to the beautiful atmosphere created by the author. Her writing has a sort of old-world vibe that I can’t describe, but that suits the 1920s-30s era perfectly. This is further enhanced by her portrayal of the small town ethos, where everyone knows everyone else and is willing to help but equally willing to gossip.
Every chapter begins with a quote. Most of these quotes are connected to radium, and spoken either by scientists or by the radium girls in actual interviews. The last couple of chapters have biblical verses instead of quotes.
There are no photographs in the book, but the author does provide resource links at the end of her note, one of which is to Leonard Grossman’s website. Leonard is the son of the attorney who fought for Catherine and her friends pro bono, and his site contains plenty of photographs and newspaper clippings connected to the court case. Looking through these articles showed me how faithful the author had been to the truth whenever she had concrete information about the events of that period.
Some of you might have heard of or even read Kate Moore’s ‘The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women’. When the author heard this book on audio, she felt compelled to narrate Catherine Donahue’s story through this historical fiction work. While she does detail out her research in her parting note, she also makes it clear that this is a story of fiction and is to be treated as such. With so little information available online about Catherine’s life before the court case, I can’t blame her for filling in some of the blanks creatively.
At the same time, I wish the fictional timeline had been smoother. There are many time-jumps that are sometimes tricky to figure out. Though the author gives us clues at times through a reference to Catherine’s age, I would have preferred having the years mentioned. With Catherine going from nineteen to thirty-five during the course of the book, a specific year reference would have helped us understand the passage of time better. I also wanted some of the gaps in the information to be plugged in, such as why did Tom and Catherine wait so many years to get married, or how could Margaret afford to help her brother’s family. As the story was already fictionalised, such additional detailing wouldn’t have hurt the authenticity of the story but helped us understand their lives better.
If there was one major thing I could change about the book, it would be to tone down the faith-oriented content just a little, especially in the final chapter. Catherine Donohue was a devout Christian, and her thoughts as well as words reflect her beliefs amply. Though I am a practising Christian, I felt like the ending went a step too far, and somehow, spoiled the effect of the historical fiction work by providing an idyllic ending to Catherine’s story. Moreover, as some readers wouldn't have expected Catherine's beliefs to be a dominant part of the storyline, they might not appreciate the content, especially if their reading preferences don't extend to Christian fiction.
Nevertheless, this is a powerful story of a woman to be admired as much as to be pitied. What courage in the face of such a painful destiny for no fault of hers!
Strongly recommended to all readers of historical fiction.
If you want to know just how damaging the radium was to these young women, here are two sobering facts:
☠ Almost a century later, Catherine’s body, or whatever remains of it in her lead-lined coffin, is still glowing from the radium, because the radium is nowhere close near its half life of 1600 years. The same is true for all the women who died of radium poisoning.
☠ The town of Ottawa in Illinois still has areas marked as contaminated by radioactive materials and hence out of bounds. The Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety is still cleaning up the contamination left by Radium Dial Company and Luminous Processes Inc. between 1918 and 1978. One estimate suggests that about 32,000 cubic yards of radioactive soils and debris was removed from nine sites.
(I can't believe the companies went on using radium paint till 1978. Profit over humaneness, right? 😔)
Read more above these brave unwilling heroes through this impactful book, and through these links:
My thanks to Coffee and Thorn Book Tours and author Samantha Wilcoxson for a complimentary copy of “Luminous: The Story of a Radium Girl”, and for allowing me to be a part of this blog tour. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
The book is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
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Author Samantha Wilcoxson:
Her most recent work is Women of the American Revolution, which explores the lives of 18th century women, and she is currently working on a biography of James Alexander Hamilton.
Samantha loves sharing trips to historic places with her family and spending time by the lake with a glass of wine.
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Blurb:
Catherine’s life is set on an unexpected course when she accepts a job at Radium Dial. She soon finds out that the excellent pay is no recompense for the evil secret that lurks in the magical glow-in-the-dark paint. Catherine Donohoe takes on the might of a big corporation and becomes an early pioneer of social justice in the era between world wars.
Emotive and inspiring – this book will touch you like no other as you witness the devastating impact of radium poisoning on young women’s lives.
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Check out this book:
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This has been a stop on the #Luminous blog tour conducted by Coffee and Thorn Book Tours. (@CoffeeAndThorn) Thanks for stopping by!
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UPDATE: Thank you, Team Coffee & Thorn, for the lovely honour of marking this as your favourite review! I am on cloud nine!
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