![]() This paint was used to paint clock faces, safety signs, even watches for soldiers-anything that needed to glow in the dark. In the 1920s the Radium Dial Company opened a factory in Illinois producing luminous paint made from radium. (Edited to fix typos, but there are probably more I missed.) Stout has a very good storytelling talent and I hope to read more of her work in the future. This book has received good reviews, so I am apparently in the minority, but there wasn't enough plot to keep me entertained. I wanted to know more about the historical facts behind the novel, more about the people, the company, when the danger was discovered. But for me, it just didn't have the depth I was looking for. I would have liked to know more about some of the other characters. I felt a little sorry for her, too, as unlikeable as she seemed. Pearl was nasty and not very understanding but had her own battles to fight. The main fictitious characters were interesting, and I really liked Helen. And these painters, who were taught to “kiss” the paintbrush to make a sharp point before applying the paint, really did suffer. The Radium Dial Company really did exist. Too many of her friends have died too soon, and Helen has been asked to participate in tests because of her work at the company, a job she tried to hide because of “the secret.” When she tells her story, she is sixty-five, shuttled between a mental institution and the home of Pearl, her niece whom Helen helped raise, and she is still hiding the secret that she has kept for so many years. This novel is told from the perspective of Helen, who worked one summer with her sister at the Radium Dial Company when they were both just teenagers, painting clock and watch faces with radium paint so they would glow in the dark. I'm the first one on goodreads to rate it at less than 4 stars, so obviously other people really liked it. It means I liked the book, but it either had flaws, in my opinion, that caused me to enjoy it less than I might have otherwise, or it was simply not to my taste. Along the way it speaks of fear and loyalty and truth itself.įirst, I want to say that a three-star review from me is not a negative review. ![]() The story goes beyond the Radium Dial case and reflects much about our attitudes toward work, women, mental illness and aging. Stout has found a unique voice in which to tell the tragic story of the Radium Dial workers and at the same time to say much about life in this country. Sometimes fiction can speak truth in ways that the bare facts cannot. So when I came across Radium Halos by Shelley Stout I was very excited. I am sure this background is one reason I became a government lawyer enforcing workers' rights. I was deeply proud of my father and infuriated, as he was, by the injustice inflicted on these women. ![]() I grew up in the shadow of the Radium Dial case, a landmark in workers' rights in this country. Grossman, represented women from Ottawa, Illinois in litigation against the Radium Dial Corporation seeking not merely damages but also recognition of what had been done to them. Includes a Foreword by Leonard Grossman, son of the attorney for the Radium Dial painters.įive years before I was born, my father, Leonard J. She tells us her story through flashbacks, slowly revealing her past, the loved ones she's lost, and the dangerous secrets she's kept all these years. Our narrator is Helen Waterman, a 65-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was 16. Radium Halos is historical fiction based on the true events of the Radium Dial Painters, a group of female factory workers who, in the early 1920s, contracted radiation poisoning from painting luminous watch dials with radium paint. ![]()
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