THE RADIUM GIRLS

Starting in 1916, young women in New Jersey were hired to paint the luminous dials of watches—with lethal consequences.

The young readers’ edition of The Radium Girls (2017) pulls no punches. As in the adult version, it describes in agonizing detail the diseases that destroyed the lives of young dial painters who were instructed to “lip point” their brushes with each dip of radium paint. They’d leave work literally glowing, having absorbed such a large quantity of the dangerous radioactive element that they’d been told was good for their health. Moore tracks more than a dozen of the girls through their extreme suffering as the radium loosened their teeth, destroyed their jaws, ate away their bones, and caused lethal tumors. Even after the deadly aftereffects were documented, another company opened a dial-painting studio in Illinois with a similar outcome. Although these young women’s lives often ended tragically early, their determination to achieve a legal victory against the negligent companies had lasting consequences: Both important laws that would protect future workers from unsafe employment practices and improve workers’ compensation laws and a better understanding of the medical outcomes of radioactivity exposure, which also helped end nuclear tests, resulted. The only discordant note in this sensitive presentation is a single unnecessary, pandering sentence: “Grace recalled that even her boogers became luminously green!”

A fine, moving, important work for young readers.