Where the Ground Meets the Sky

Reviews
School Library Journal
This well-constructed novel has the elements of a good adventure story but also depicts one family's struggle to stay together in the face of adversity. The year is 1944 and war is raging in Europe and the Pacific while 12-year-old Hazel is fighting her own battles somewhere in the New Mexico desert. Life has gotten complicated and lonely since her dad brought her and her mother to live on the Hill, a military base surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. A brilliant physicist, he and other scientists are working on the Big Mystery, while Hazel's mother, who believes that secrets are "bad for the soul," has slowly retreated into her own world. Hazel is a strong protagonist who behaves with compassion and sensitivity toward family and friends. She experiences the emotional loss of her mother and the physical loss of her father, who spends countless hours at work on "the gadget." The gold-star banners found on some of the houses on the Hill that signify the death of a serviceman, and the death of Hazel's friend's cat, which had been exposed to radiation, symbolize the tragic nature of war. The descriptive narrative wonderfully juxtaposes the dreariness of the Hill with the beauty of the natural landscape, offering hope. This suspenseful story successfully captures the tensions of a volatile period in American history as the atomic bomb was being developed. Readers will be left with plenty to think about and no simple answers.

Booklist
Twelve-year-old Hazel is too smart for her own good, and she's astonished by the oddness of her life. Her family has moved from New Jersey to some place in New Mexico called the "Hill"--which doesn't even have an address. Her father is working on something so secret he cannot talk about it, and her mother is becoming increasingly distant as the year goes on. The story is told in Hazel's lively, if self-conscious voice, and it is set in 1944 at family compounds that materialized so scientists could work on the Manhattan Project--the atomic bomb. Davies skillfully describes the secrecy and intensity of the work and how it affected every aspect of the researchers' and their families' lives. The moral issues are handled rather clumsily, and Hazel's mother's mental illness in the face of her husband's terrifying job seems like an easy out. But, as Hazel makes a friend, discovers a secret, and grapples with her own fiery intelligence, a portion of American history that wasn't so very long ago takes on shape and reality.

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