Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I am reviewing Atomic Love by Jeannie Fields. Visit the author’s website here. This review has minor spoilers.
I admit that I started this book several times. For some reason, it was hard for me to get into it, and I had to start over once or twice. Not that this book is hard, it isn’t. The writing is pretty straightforward and clear. The problem is that I wasn’t in the right mindset for it when I first started it. I read a lot of historical fiction, but surprisingly, I’m not a big fan of books set in WWII. I don’t know why. In fact, this is the first book set in the years after WWII that I have read in a very long time and there are probably better books to have started reading about this period again than this one. And I know for a fact that there are; I can think of a few. But oddly enough this book was exactly what I needed at the time when I did read it.
This book is a romance. The characters are loosely based on historical figures but the story itself is fictional. Set in Chicago 1950, Rosalind Porter, a physicist who worked in the Manhattan Project during the war, is now working at Marshall Fields behind a counter at the jewelry department. She sells antique jewelry and is living by herself in an apartment she can barely afford anymore. Her life is full of regrets now; regret for her part in creating the bomb and regret for her failed relationship with Thomas Wheeler, one of her co-workers in the Project, whom she was madly in love with. He inexplicably ended their relationship and got her fired from the Project. And now, five years later, she is still in love with him and far from the scientist she once used to be.
“How do we survive a world where death awaits at all times.”
You would think that Rosalind is mad as hell because of this; because he ruined her career. But no, she still loves him (for some reason). Five years later, however, he is the last person Rosalind expects to hear from again. But she does, and he wants to meet with her. Rosalind is also aware that someone has been following her for days and that he watches her while she works. The thought frightens her, and she wonders if the man’s presence has anything to do with Tom Wheeler contacting her again. It does. The strange man following her approaches her and introduces himself as an FBI agent. Agent Charlie Szydlo and he tells her that the agency suspects Wheeler is spying for the Russians. So he asks her to spy on Wheeler in turn…
This is the setup for the novel, and then we focus on the romance. I will say that it is not your everyday romance novel that has a love-triangle (or I just haven’t read that many); not like YA, where this trope has been used over and over to last a lifetime and is highly overrated, but this one does and though I was not thrilled about it, it served a purpose. The story is predictable however in that we know from the beginning that Rosalind is going to end up with Szydlo, and I admit that I liked this pairing. I found myself rooting for them as a couple not because I especially liked Rosalind and wanted to see her happy (I was strangely indifferent to her; I didn’t like or dislike her), but because I liked Szydlo more than I had expected. However, I will say that the ending soured the book for me. Him not wanting Rosalind to go back to work changed my opinion of him; he wanted a woman who would stay home and cook for him (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but what he and Rosalind wanted in the end wasn’t the same thing, and I found myself wondering if I’d ever want to read the book again knowing how it ended. The answer is no. Rosalind does go back to work, true, but this is bound to bring them problems in the long run, and I did not like finding out that they were not as compatible as I thought they were in the last page of the novel. Romance, after all, is about the happy ending, and this did not give me happy ending vibes. I gave this book an Okay rating.
