At the same time, her classmate Suze is equally shunned for her (large-ish) size – and the two girls end up becoming friends. But life is not particularly easy because most of the other kids (especially the girls) want nothing to do with Dewey. There, Dewey is left mostly to her own devices – quite literally too, since Dewey has a love for all things mechanical and loves inventing new things. The Gadget is of course, the atomic bomb and Los Alamos is the secret location of the Manhattan Project. Her father has been absent since the beginning of the War and now lives at Los Alamos, working on a secret project which is only referred to as “the gadget” throughout the book. In 1943, 11-year-old Dewey is on her way to spend some time with her mathematician father after her grandmother suffers a stroke and can no longer take care of her. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project not the mathematicians and scientists and least of all, Dewey–know how much “the gadget” is about to change their lives.

It is called Los Alamos, and it is abuzz with activity, as scientists and mathematicians from all over America and Europe work on the biggest secret of all–“the gadget.” None of them–not J. Soon she arrives at a town that, officially, doesn’t exist. It’s 1943, and eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is en route to New Mexico to live with her mathematician father. To kick things off, Ana reviews historical YA novel Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages (2006), and Thea tackles the third and concluding novel in the Darkangel trilogy, The Pearl of the Soul of the World by Meredith Ann Pierce (1990). On Old School Wednesdays, we take a break from the new and pay homage to the old by reviewing books that are at least 5 years old.

Inspired by our defunct From the Dungeons feature (owing a dash of inspiration from Angieville’s Retro Fridays), we decided to create a new feature for 2013. And what better way to snap out of a reading fugue than to take a mini-vacation into the past?

Welcome, everyone, to the start of a brand new Smugglerific feature! Today we bring you the first in an ongoing weekly special: Old School Wednesdays! We came up with the idea towards the end of last year, when both of us were feeling exhausted from the never-ending inundation of new and shiny (and often over-hyped) books.

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages