The next stop on the TLC Book Tour is The Hanford Necklace by Shannon St. Hilaire.
I received a free review copy of this book from the author for this stopover. I was not paid for this review and all opinions, thoughts and rants are completely my own.
About the book:
The Hanford Necklace by Shannon St. Hilaire
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication date: October 6, 2026
Gilmore Girls meets Oppenheimer in this dual-timeline family saga, set in a Manhattan Project town, about a granddaughter who uncovers her grandmother’s nuclear-age secrets and her own toxic inheritance.
What is the half-life of O’Toole family secrets?
In 2013, Saige is stuck living with her Granny Rosamond in her beige wasteland of a hometown. Desperate for a diagnosis and cure for her mysterious ailments, she uncovers more than she bargained for—a hot rock that shouldn’t exist and a past Rosamond refuses to explain.
That past takes place in the 1940s, when 50,000 people move to an eastern Washington town that doesn’t exist to build something they can’t name. Rosamond is one of them, eager to do her bit for the war effort—and find a husband. When she falls for a charming engineer, she envisions a perfect life. But as the hot war turns cold and her ever-expanding family becomes increasingly troubled, she discovers this nuclear town is no utopia, and she must decide whether to cling to the destructive facade of domestic bliss or face the truth that could save them all.
When Rosamond’s past collides with Saige’s search for healing, half-buried secrets—from the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere to the wounds within their own family—can no longer be ignored. Can Saige discover the truth and heal herself without destroying her grandmother’s life?
“The Hanford Necklace is an absorbing and haunting novel—one that will linger long with readers . . . A truly heart-rending, revelatory work.”—Maryka Biaggio, author of Gun Girl and the Tall Guy and Margery and Me
“A visceral page-turner about a granddaughter uncovering the plutonium-laced secrets of her grandmother’s past and a complicated family legacy created at the intersection of science and patriotism, secrets and lies, violence and love, and what happens when home is the thing that’s slowly killing you.”—Ellen Baker, author of The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson
About the author:
Shannon St. Hilaire writes about forgotten histories and the fascinating women who lived through them. She is the author of To Look Upon The Sun, The Ones Who Stayed, and The Hanford Necklace. Her short work placed first in the 2020 Forge Flash Nonfiction Competition and has appeared in literary journals such as New Delta, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and Five South. She serves on the board of directors for The People’s Colloquium, a non-profit that supports free education in the arts and humanities, and lives just outside of Portland, Oregon. (from Simon & Schuster)
What I thought…..
St. Hilaire is quite descriptive and I could easily imagine Saige’s hometown from the very first sentence:
This place is a wasteland of brown barren flatness, where tumbleweeds tear up car engines and the trendiest restaurant is P.F. Chang’s by the mall…. It’s like a small town in the sense that literally nothing is going on—culturally, artistically, topographically. It’s like a city in the sense that people aren’t nice. They don’t all know one another, and they don’t care to. (1)
While Saige’s hometown and family could not be described as traditional in any sense, she will find old family friends that do help her and one family member she can rely on.
Saige, what is up with her and her mysterious illness and her outlook on life? An English major (how droll and useless) she refuses to read anything that was not “in the canon” (4) until returning home to her Granny’s and reading what was to her Granny’s liking (including some romantic smut).
Is Saige a reliable narrator? I wasn’t too sure until the final few chapters. I felt like her obsession with finding an object that would unravel her medical mysteries was a little naive.
Saige’s narration is balanced by her grandmother’s own tale of herself as a young woman. Rose tells her story, one of an intelligent young woman who finds relevancy doing important work during the war years. When Rose marries and has child after child, she loses herself.
Truly, at times I enjoyed reading Rose’s story much more than I did of Saige’s tales of woe and pitifulness. I also lost patience with the entire whacked out adult children that were either psychotic or irrational or unfeeling. While every family is dysfunctional in its own way, those O’Tooles have a lot of issues. Some of those issues are cringeworthy.
I’m being harsh. Hanford is a real place with real maladies and real tragedies (as experienced personally by the author). St. Hilaire’s writing is solid. It’s just some of the characters that were unpalatable and sometimes I thought Saige needed reined in.
I’m totally unsure about the whole Gilmore Girls reference in the publisher’s blurb.
I would recommend this book. The history lesson alone is a reason to pick it up.
I usually do a food tie-in with most all my novel reviews. While there were some food references in the novel, I almost didn’t want to focus on a recipe for The Hanford Necklace. I didn’t want to trivialize the historical value of this novel and the many medical issues that its residence continue to suffer.
Screwdrivers do show up again and again in the novel. Saige tries to bond with her grandmother, Rose, over these cocktails. When Rose makes a momentous decision to expose the Hanford project, she celebrates with a screwdriver. Plus, it’s been a while since I posted a cocktail recipe.
Screwdriver Cocktail w/Sage
By Debra
Ingredients
- 2 oz. vodka (I use Tito’s.)
- 4-5 oz. fresh orange juice
- ice
- fresh sage and an orange
Instructions
- Fill a highball glass with ice.
- Add vodka and orange juice. Stir.
- Garnish with an orange slice.
Yield: 1 cocktail
In honor of Saige, I garnished this drink with a bit of that herb.
The herb was a great addition!
Thanks to the author and TLC for the opportunity to read this novel.
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