When I finished this book, I thought, "Holy moly, this is a good book."

The premise of this book is a hook that draws you in: author Lucy Jane Bledsoe is writing about the life of her aunt and namesake, Lucybelle Bledsoe. She didn't know her aunt well because Lucybelle perished in a fire when Lucy Jane was nine. However, when trying to learn more about her aunt as an adult, she learned that Lucybelle had had a remarkable life, and one with quite a lot in common with Lucy Jane.

The aunt was a science writer who played a key role in seminal climate research - part of the first team that pulled ice cores down to bedrock in Greenland and Antarctica. These ice cores started climate science and are still used today. Lucybelle was an Arkansas farm girl smart enough to pass the bar exam without ever having attended law school who moved to Greenwich Village in New York just as fast as she could. And, during the McCarthy era, she was a lesbian, all while working on this then-top-secret government project.

The author explains her research process at the end of the book - how some information online led her to her aunt's work life, which led to interviews with former co-workers, and finally to parts of her aunt's life slowly being uncovered. The author says about half of the story is based on facts she was able to learn, and the other half was filling in the holes, how the author imagined her aunt felt between those facts.

The novel, or fictionalized memoir, or some combination thereof, covers the roughly ten-year period from the mid-50s to mid-60s where Lucybelle worked for the lab run by the Army Corps of Engineers that studied Arctic ice cores. Her work takes her from New York to a new life in Chicago and later New Hampshire. While work is the key that led the author to information about her aunt's life, the novel is really about what Lucybelle's life may have been like outside of work. The friendships and relationships, the hidden life of being a lesbian, and even her responses to the Civil Rights movement happening at the same time.

Lucybelle was a remarkable woman and this ode to her life from a beloved niece is a lovely. But it is also an ode to queer history. The story of what it was like to be a queer woman living in the McCarthy era, when so much had to be hidden and suppressed, is striking and moving. I was moved by Lucybelle's bravery (and certainly much of that was true to life), and the bravery of queer people living honestly in those closeted and fearful times. And I was also full of gratefulness all the way through that, despite backlash against progress, I can live my queer life openly and honestly without almost any fear. To my family, at work, with all my friends, holding my wife's hand walking down the street, kissing her good-bye at the bus stop in the morning. Yes, I live in Seattle. But this book helped me see/remember oh how very much times have changed.

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Two fave quotes:
"One time they held hands while walking along the lake. Their joined palms felt like a fuse in an outlet, as if their touch was the source of everything that mattered, as if by doing this, holding hands in public, they'd be able to make better photographs and write better stories. Make better love. The power of those few minutes of not hiding felt like it could fuel an entire country." p. 161

"'It's not exactly my pond. I have Trout Brook to thank for delivering the water caught in the form of snow by Smarts Mountain. Not to mention the recession of the last glaciers twelve thousand years ago.'
'I hadn't meant to imply that you dug and filled the pond.'
'I realize that. But I don't even think that I own a part of it. I'm squatting here.'
'You have a cabin.'
'Yes. Agreed. But I'm only dwelling here. Fleeting, temporary.'
'We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.'
'Ah. You understand.'" p. 249 ( )

Bledsoe's novel has an enticing premise: she discovers a previously unknown aunt, a scientist and lesbian in the Cold War era.

The problem is execution. The prose is often convoluted and overwrought. The major issue, though, is that Bledsoe, understandably excited about her real-life discovery, attempts to cram too much into a slim novel. Fact and fiction blend uneasily: confirmed scientific details stand apart from the imagined events.

Oddly, the novel criticizes the lesbian pulp fiction of the time, but it draws from them frequently. While Bledsoe does deal with larger social issues (e.g. race relations), the histrionic relationships remain. In an unlikely fact-meets-fiction way, the end is also traditional for pulp novels. I have tried to think of ways Bledsoe subverts pulp novels, but I can't come up with much. Again, the melodramatic prose does not help.

Women in the workforce, the Civil Rights Movement: it's all here. And it's too much. Bledsoe might have done better to mine one particular issue in depth rather than write about so many in a more shallow way. The intersectionality of race and sexuality is important to explore: the novel raises the issue but does little to address it.

The premise is extremely enticing, but the execution is a slog. ( )