Radium Girls

Beautifully, drawn, no substitute for getting the full story, though. Still packs a gut punch.

Inspired by Kate Moore's The Radium Girls, this graphic novel pays tribute to the girls lost due to radium poisoning.

The artwork is fantastic and has a pleasing color palette. The hard edges add a lot of personality to the pages. Though some of the names are the same as well as the backstories, I'd say this is only loosely based on the real women involved. While their illness was certainly a driving force in the story, it was more about social and personal issues at the time. There are a lot of gaps in the narrative, too, and though those gaps are typically filled with artwork, it still felt like something was missing. In any case, I've been looking forward to reading this for a while now and was thrilled when it was finally restocked. It was an enjoyable read as well as an emotional one.

I enjoyed the color palette. At times it was difficult to tell some of the sisters apart, but the larger story of what was happening to the women employed at the company and the time period shone through. I also enjoyed the interview with the author at the end.

French artist tells a story that was happening in the US in the 1920's, there's women in the work place, suffrage, and prohibition. The story is told through a group of women who are friends.

About halfway through the girls go to the beach and see something that at first I was unsure about the woman without an arm at Coney Island who gets stares from the ‘Radium Girls' and judgement that she shouldn't expose her ‘deformity' to children. But then I thought that it was perhaps ‘fitting of the times' and then by the end I thought that perhaps the knew how that woman felt as most of them were missing teeth, at least one of them used a wheelchair