Customer Reviews

St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb

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I first picked up St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb while working in the lovely agony that is Borders Books & Music.

Seeing and selling books on a daily basis (especially when you already love them) is a wonderful thing, but it also lends you a certain amount of discernment, and even distaste for what some might call "The Formula" for hitting the jackpot with a Bestseller.

This book was on the New Arrival table, and the cover attracted me; I am a self-professed quality product junkie- I can spot one from miles away, and this book, while not along the same lines as the paperback version of, say, Eragon, is beautiful...unique. The compact size and delicate inner font make it feel like a specially-made gift for someone perceptive enough to see it and recognize it as something wonderful.

Raine Rassaby is not your typical high school student. In fact, one struggles to even place her in the same plane as schooling- she has been bred a free spirit who has decided that her job in life is to rid the world of nuclear weapons and educate those who are not nearly scared enough of being roasted inside their own skin.

Taking her second whack at senior year, she feels admiration, separation, loneliness, grief, and enlightenment for the people around her. She also feels a strangeness which is "in the world but not of the world."

Meeting Al Klepatar, Raine's guidance counselor, you don't quite know if he is a character that shines enough for the time he's allotted, but you quickly find out that Al, like every well-written character in this book, is so brilliant because he truly is a real man. These characters are believable, real, true in how they react to one another.

Al and Raine form their own little humorous unit, however opposite they may be, and their relationship becomes one of the central dialogues in the novel, regardless of whether they're actually speaking to one another.
You really get the sense that these two are tied together for a three-legged contest and they're just crashing along as best they can.

The very essence of this book feels to be that there are these two people, caught in the whiplash that is life. Good stuff happens, bad stuff happens- things they cannot control, and decisions that might have been made differently. They are polar opposites, but they are fighting the same unseen enemy.

This book has so much heart. Valerie Hurley is an excellent writer and I look forward to anything else that she puts out there, especially if it is anything like this. No wonder it took her so many years to pen- it's a beautiful collection of all those little moments that graduate into how you see life. The whole novel hums with a steady heartbeat.

If you find yourself gravitating towards books that may be well-written, but immersed in the intense eye of the public or bestseller lists, then this book is not for you.

But if you find yourself looking for that book with the edge, the quietly satisfying novel whose small triumphs and delightfully simple writing are there to be picked up like wildflowers, then this book is for you.

This is a delightful, beautifully written book. Why are there no other books in print by this author? Valerie Hurley has created a wonderful soul in Raine Rassaby - the product of a VERY mixed environment and history including a concert violinist mother and a shamanistic housekeeper from Greenland. Some of the best elements are when Raine speaks directly in conversation or through her diary. She expresses herself in parable - there is a hint of magic realism. All of this is grounded in every day stresses, politics and life. I have not enjoyed a character so much since J. D. Salinger's Glass family.

ST. URSULA'S GIRLS AGAINST THE ATOMIC BOMB is set at an exhausting pace, about a maiden on the verge, who thinks Big Thoughts in a small world, who can't see the point of trigonometry when global destruction is at hand, & who might well have an undiagnosed case of ADD. She certainly is in the eye of the hormone cyclone!

She also has one of the severest cases of Social Conscience in Manhattan. This, naturally, propels everyone in Raine's life into both amusing adventures & serious life-changing decisions.

Although some of the connections this young woman makes (she is 18 already) raises red flags of inappropriateness, & her liaison with a young man is skipped over with mind-boggling simplicity, Raine's out of control life is a wonder to behold until...

Rebeccasreads recommends ST. URSULA'S GIRLS AGAINST THE ATOMIC BOMB for older teenagers as well as adults because it's a lively, tell-it-like-it-is story which may help a lot of teens make some sense of what they see about them, & the grown-up world into which they are heading.

This debut novel is about a young impressionable girl who lives in a picture perfect world. She is a star gazer like her dad. Blue jays abound in her yard there on W. 88th St.; I have found four here in Krutch Park who pose for me to take their photos after I have fed them, of course.

This 18-yr-old rescues wounded birds (good for her), develops an interest in nurclear missile silos, and organizes her own group of girls against the atomic bomb at St. Ursula's School. She seemed to be obsessed with Stalin and Hitler, plus the Nurenberg trials. She is sent to discuss her concerns with the guidance counselor and they fall in love.

So, what else is new? I married my college lit teacher. But this little book brings things to today's world, how the privileged don't have enough to do with all their wealth and must find 'causes' to satisfy their yearnings.

She won an award in 1999 for her fiction in Indiana and has had some of her writings published in various literary magazines. I feel we have a new talent here and will look forward to her next endeavor.

ST. URSLUA'S GIRLS AGAINST THE ATOMIC BOMB by Valerie Hurley is about a young woman, Raine Rassaby (what a great name!), who is awkward and precocious, outlandish and blatantly honest. Her social conscience is in overdrive at all times -- making up for both her parents who seem to have next to none. She cannot stay out of trouble, partly because she acts out her fears in sometimes inappropriate ways.

Raine is drawn to Pavel, a young Jewish man who rescues wounded birds and talks to old people at picnics. Hurley describes the difference between Pavel and Raine: "He was fascinated by the Holocaust, but he was not obsessed by it. Raine took the doom much more personally, feeling threatened by humanity's cruel streak. She made lists of all the obominable things human beings had done througout history and pasted them in a scrapbook called HORRIBLE BUT TRUE THINGS YOU'D RATHER NOT KNOW."

Raine is a compelling character throughout the book because of the adventures that her unstoppable social conscience leads her into. But what I find most appealing about her is how she becomes a sponge for wisdom. At age eighteen, she is influenced by her Slovakian grandmother, who exudes wisdom. Raine likes to spend time in the kitchen with "Vikey", who talks with Raine as she cooks kosher. Vikey was born in 1903. Hurley writes: "It was a good time to born, she said, because to live is a privilege, even if the Nazis decided to march into your homeland and kill two of your cousins and your sisters, Gitta and Sessi. Still the world was beautiful, she said--full of astonishing things."

"When Raine told her about her fears, Vikey said, 'Fear isn't something to be gotten rid of. It's something real and human, something to pay attention to. Drunks are fearless but that doesn't make them courageous. Fear is a signal, to be honored and listened to. It was proper for us to be afraid of the Nazis and Hlinka Guard and not berate ourselves for our fear.'"

Raine is not a very successful student, so she has a guidance counselor at the Catholic school in which her parents have enrolled her. The guidance counselor tries, to no avail, to keep Raine more interested in her studies than in starting her "bomb group." He says: "Raine, I would be derelict in my duty if I encouraged your involvement in this silly, illusory bomb group." Raine responds with: "I love being a Jew, but I kind of wish I was Catholic because Catholics feel so guilty. [...] I'm expecting my group to spread like the plague at St. Ursula's because Catholics feel guilty even when they're innocent."

Raine has a strained relationship with her parents, though in a rare, frank conversation with her father, he reveals what it was like for Raine's mother who lived in Slovakia for the first six years of her life, and how she took food out to the Jews who Vikey had hidden. He ends by saying: "I wonder what that was like."

"She won't talk about it," Raine said. "Maybe I'm picking up all the horrible stuff she's repressing. Did you ever think of that?"

It is hard not to love someone so witty and wise as Raine. When she finds out that her guidance counselor's wife, Frieda, is going biking with a man from work, who Frieda says is nice, Raine is ready with her remark: "Nice guys do not finish last, Al. That's a myth." It turns out Raine is absolutely right.

As Al's relationship with his wife falls apart and Raine's relationship with Pavel also falters, Raine and Al find themselves thinking of one another constantly. Not only is he counseling Raine, but she ends up counseling him. They each have their turn at bailing one another out of jail. In one of Raine's revealing journal entries, she writes about Al's childhood and then this: "So he marries Frieda, plops down on a desk chair at St. Ursula's, and doesn't move a muscle for fourteen years. Then he meets me, and we try to resurrect each other, which is like Klaus Barbie and Rudolf Hess having a picnic on the town square in Berlin. I was depressed about nuclear weapons, and he was depressed about Frieda. Now I'm depressed about Frieda, and he's depressed about nuclear weapons. Oh well. Not every truth can be blown on a trumpet."

When Raine is fearful about a calamity in her life, she describes a dream to Al in which her fear became a monster. Al said, "When fear talks, cowards listen."

The give and take in Raine's and Al's relationship as they share in one another's fears, triumphs, humor, and wisdom draws the reader in slowly. They bumble along until they find their lives have intertwined in ways one would never have expected. In the beginning of the book, there is a hint of Raine's and Al's attraction for one another, but then I found myself dismissing any thoughts of a romantic involvement between the two, partly because they are such an unlikely pair. And I admit, I didn't want them to become involved -- rather I was hoping each would find their equals in someone their own age, and... well... in a more APPROPRIATE relationship. And that is just exactly what this book was good at--complicating my view of an "appropriate" relationship. ST. URSLUA'S GIRLS AGAINST THE ATOMIC BOMB illustrates our need as humans to be understood, and how that understanding can evolve into love, even in an unlikely partner.

I love reading philosophical novels, and ST. URSLUA'S GIRLS AGAINST THE ATOMIC BOMB is one of my favorites.