I have been recommending this book to my friends as a horror story. It has everything I want out of a historical novel: characters that feel like they belong to the time period, rich details, a conflict that feels weighty but belongs to a part of history that is too often overlooked. All the same, it doesn’t feel like the historical novels I’ve been reading lately.
I mean this in the best way. It feels like so much more.
The story alternates between the 1940s and the 1960s, and between the eyes of Mary Boone and her neighbor Luke Hinson. In the 1940s, Mary is employed by the United States government at Hanford, slowly realizing that radioactive materials released as a result of the war effort are harming the people in her town. By the 1960s, she has disappeared, and her mystery continues to haunt Luke even as he pursues the effects of radiation into the soil, whales in the ocean, and even his own cells.
Tangles captures a vital corner of American history, an ecological disaster too few people are aware of, due in large part to the concerted efforts at the time to suppress all knowledge of it. Creating fictional characters allows Smith-Blum to humanize the disaster in a way nonfiction often struggles to do, and the alternating timelines allow not only for two interconnected mysteries to unfold in tandem but also for a growing sense of dread, which Smith-Blum keeps understated and haunting.
What I liked best about the novel, however, was the sense that it had guts and teeth. I have often read historical fiction which feels distant and elegiac, as though we are looking at the past through a veil and being reminded that we are experiencing a time lost to our modern sensibilities. Tangles occasionally touches on that, but more often it has a sense of immediacy.
Partly this is because perils which can wreak havoc on the environment on a large scale are not remotely lost to the past. Another part, however, comes from Smith-Blum’s ability to plant readers into the moment her characters live in. The details of day-to-day life are exquisitely captured, and rather than serving as set pieces to tell us when and where we are, they are details which enrich the characters’ surroundings.
I highly recommend this book, to fans of historical fiction and beyond. This is a story of a time which far too few people are familiar with.
