It is all too easy, half a century on, to regard the
coruscating terror of ordinary Americans during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a
dry historical fact rather than a traumatic lived experience. The novelist Todd
Strasser, who was a boy at the time, and whose family preparations for nuclear
war included building a bomb shelter under their suburban ranch house, has
evidently not forgotten the intensity of 1962. Memory here has given rise to a
gripping and superbly constructed novel for sophisticated young readers ages 10
and older. In "Fallout" (Candlewick, 258 pages, $16.99), however, the
Russians really do drop the bomb, and when the sirens wail, Scott Porter and
his parents and little brother, rushing to their homemade bunker, are almost
overwhelmed by neighbors frantic to gain refuge in the area's only fallout
shelter.
There's not a word out of place in this evocative book,
which toggles between the ever-more-dire predicament of the people in the
overfilled bunker and the placid neighborhood during the weeks before the
crisis. Mr. Strasser's skill at ratcheting up the tension is, if anything,
exceeded by his ability to conjure midcentury ways of thinking—and a vanished
culture in which aspirational fathers drank Dubonnet, beatniks were a
present-tense curiosity, and children were amazed at the very idea of
homosexuality.
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