In 1958, Edith Higgenbothum, a housewife in Richland, Washington, downwind of the massive Hanford nuclear weapons production site, discovers that the milk her young son Herbie drinks contains radioactive iodine from Hanford's secret fallout releases. Radioactive iodine can damage the thyroid, especially in children.
When Herbie is diagnosed with aggressive thyroid cancer, Edith allies with mothers of children with thyroid cancer and leukemia in communities blanketed by fallout from Nevada Test Site A-bomb tests on a true atomic age hero's journey to save the children.
Publication Date: September 15th, 2025
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Press
Pages: 328
Genre: Historical Fiction / Dark Humour
What inspired you to start writing?
I have always loved to write, and had written poetry and other pieces over the years. I have published two books, the first, The Hanford Plaintiffs, a nonfiction account of children’s exposure to radioactive fallout downwind of Hanford, an atomic weapons production site in eastern Washington State in the US. My novel, Then Came the Summer Snow, an atomic age hero’s journey, is the fictional tale of a mother in Richland, Washington, the Atomic City immediately downwind of Hanford where I was born and raised.
My inspiration for writing these two Hanford-related books was to educate readers about what happened to all of us who were unknowingly exposed as children to low dose ionizing radiation downwind of atomic weapons production sites (like Hanford) and testing sites (like the Nevada Test Site). The interviews of personal injury plaintiffs in In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation, mass toxic tort litigation which concluded with a small number of modest settlements in 2015, was therapeutic for me. I often feel so alone, living with the disabling health consequences of childhood radiation exposure. Interviewing others like me, people who had grown up within Hanford’s vast downwind and downriver fallout zones helped me feel less alone with the legacy of Hanford.
The US government has not helped or compensated many of the people who were exposed as infants and children to Hanford’s fallout and who now live with cancers and other disabling radiation-caused health problems. Without the efforts of a courageous investigative journalist, Karen Dorn Steele, and those few individuals within the farming communities across the Columbia River from Hanford who documented cancers and early heart attacks in their neighbors, the Department of Energy would likely never have declassified historic Hanford operating records that, when made public, put all of us on notice that we had been exposed to chronic, significant levels of ionizing radiation. Only then could we begin to seek medical care. Had this information been made public decades earlier, it would have allowed some of these cancers and other diseases to be caught and treated early.
What was the hardest part about writing this book?
I very much enjoyed writing this novel. I worked so hard and so long on my earlier nonfiction book, The Hanford Plaintiffs, documenting the sadness and loss in so many of us
involuntarily exposed to the radioactive byproducts of plutonium production downwind and downriver of Hanford.
I had never written a novel, but it certainly sounded like an easier task than nonfiction. I totally loved writing the novel, from the perspective of dark humor. I felt that approaching this difficult topic through humor would entice more people to read about Hanford- people who might normally shy away from sad or serious topics.
I have a wonderful writing coach who believes in me, and who gave me excellent feedback that enriched the work. One of my favorite aspects of writing Then Came the Summer Snow was researching the 1950s- the role of women, the ads in magazine and TVs, the cars, the jingles, and the Burma Shave signs! They don’t call the period “The Nifty Fifties” for nothing!
Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?
Several of the characters hold a special place in my heart. I modeled Herb on my father, who was a safety engineer at Hanford, overseeing the production reactors. Like Herb, my Dad always ate 2/3 of a banana on his cereal for breakfast. Didn’t matter whether the banana was big or small. Always 2/3. I would always see bowls with the week’s blackened 1/3 bananas on the kitchen counter.
Edith is the mother I wish I had had. Don’t get me wrong- I loved my mother, but I wish my own mother had evolved as Edith did into a fierce atomic age feminist. To the best of my knowledge, not one housewife in Richland discovered that the local milk was radioactive, or at least, not one housewife spoke up if she knew the milk was radioactive. There were uranium prospecting Geiger counters in many households, so I ask—why didn’t just one mother or one child turn the thing on and discover that the milk, and possibly other food, was radioactive?
I so wish my mother had discovered this when I was very young, so that I would have been removed from the toxic/radioactive environment of Richland. I wish she had developed the strength of Edith, that she had stood up to the lies that Richland was a safe place to raise a child perpetrated by my father’s employers. I wish my father had evolved as did Herb- how much did my father know about levels of airborne and river-borne radiation being released from the site? Did he ever worry that it might not be safe? I understand that, in the post-war Cold War years in the US, the push was to produce atomic weapons stockpiles to defend against nuclear attack by the Soviet Union (the USSR had tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949), but where is the care for the welfare of the infants and children who lived downwind? Downwind of Hanford, downwind of the Nevada Test Site, downwind of other Cold War production and testing sites.
If your book was to be made into a movie, who are the celebrities that would star in it?
I would choose a young, blonde starlet as Edith. Someone who looks like she takes housecleaning seriously, yet someone who is believable when she begins to stand up against the male-dominated atomic war machine.
For Herb, a slightly overweight man who is comfortable wearing coke bottle glasses, some one who easily looks befuddled, someone who doesn’t mind stuffing his face with Spudnuts in time of stress.
Herbie- a ten year old boy like this: Then Came the Summer Snow Book Trailer
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I hope readers enjoy the story, the characters, and the interwoven details of the 1950s. But, even more than that, with every reader of my books, another person comes to understand what the US government did to innocent children downwind of atomic production and testing sites in the name of national security. Claiming to protect American citizens from atomic attack by the Soviet Union through building its atomic weapons stockpile, the US in reality sacrificed its own.
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
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Thanks so much for hosting Trisha Pritikin today, with such a revealing chat about her moving novel, Then Came The Summer Snow.
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club