THE RADIUM GIRLS: THE DARK STORY OF AMERICA'S SHINING WOMEN

THE RADIUM GIRLS: THE DARK STORY OF AMERICA'S SHINING WOMEN by Kate Moore

There is a YA edition of this book for high school age. My daughter read the adult version in upper high school, and it was very tragic but doable for her.

Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a hard, nonfiction book to read, not because of the dense text, but because of the mental images that form as you read the story. As one of my older daughters recently told me, she could not read the book at night due to the descriptions of physical deformities and death that happened to these innocent girls. So what exactly happened?

Radium was the new rage! Touted as a health tonic and prized for its illuminating properties, these poor girls never dreamed in a million years that they were subjecting themselves to a very painful death by working with it. In fact, quite the opposite! It was a privilege to be one of the few girls chosen to be a dial painter. A dial painter took a very fine paintbrush and painstakingly painted the numbers on watches. The result was numbers that glowed. These girls were paid very well for their work. They could afford to dress in the top fashions and light up the town literally! They would paint their skin, their lips, etc with the radium, and their clothes glowed from the dust that would settle on them. The most horrific thing they did? In between their brush strokes they would lick their paintbrushes to form them back into the finest points for the best results of painting over the watchface numbers. They never imagined they were killing themselves in the process. Radium equaled good health, remember? It did until their teeth started falling out, and sores that wouldn't heal formed in their mouths, and their jaws started fracturing in pieces, and they could spit the pieces out in their hands. Next came hemorrhaging and cancers, and bones that were disintegrating in their legs and hips. What did their company do for them? They let them go. They denied what was happening even when it happened over and over. This book is their story.

HEADS UP- This book is squeaky clean! Just be prepared for intense descriptions of the breakdown of these girls' bodies due to the poisoning that was going on. There is also a section of photographs. Most of the photos are pictures of the real people in this story. However, there are a few showing the deformities that occured.