The Hanford Necklace by Shannon St. Hilaire ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

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.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.  A free book was provided for an honest review.

October 2026; She Writes Press; 979-8896361664
audio, ebook, print (376 pages); historical fiction

There was a fresh scar on Susan’s throat, the result of a thyroidectomy to remove her cancerous thyroid gland. The scar, Susan explains, is called a Hanford necklace (“So many people around here have had the surgery that it got itself a nickname”), named for the Hanford Manhattan Project plant that converted uranium into plutonium to create the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Hanford Necklace is a dual-timeline novel about Hanford, Washington, where over 50,000 people moved to a new town in Washington in the early 1940s to work on plutonium production to assist the Manhattan Project in creating the atomic bomb.  The people who worked there were not informed of the danger, only told that they were doing their part to help the United States win World War II.  The second timeline in the novel takes place in 2013 and looks at the repercussions of the atomic waste that was released into the water and soil and the effects that it had on one family.

1943 – Rosemond traveled from Chicago to Hanford to work to help America win the war as many other women were doing at the time.  When she arrived, she was given a job in a lab working with plutonium and was never told the dangers.  She loved her job, but her main interest was meeting men and going to dances.  She soon met and fell in love with a young scientist and envisioned a perfect life in her future.  Life didn’t turn out the way she planned, and her marriage was difficult, and the utopia that she thought she had found turned out to be a destructive town with large numbers of cancers and deaths.  She has to make a decision whether to continue with her life or admit what she knew about her husband to the authorities.

2013 – Saige is sick and unable to work, so she moves in with her grandmother, Rosemond, in Hanford, surrounded by other family members in town.  Saige's illness is a mystery – she has been to numerous doctors and had a plethora of tests, but nothing shows up!   When rummaging through her grandmother’s basement, looking for some romance novels, she finds a warm piece of metal that she later finds out is a button of plutonium.  How and why did it get to her grandmother’s house?  When she questions her grandmother, the plutonium disappears.  Saige begins to wonder if her illness, as well as the cancers and deaths of other family members, was somehow tied to the plutonium. Is there any way Saige can discover the truth and heal herself without destroying her grandmother’s life?

This novel effectively weaves together the tragic tale of the contamination of Hanford, Washington, and the effects that it has on one family years later.  It took the massive cover-up of the US government to the micro level of one small group of people and showed how the pollution of the land and water in their town affected their lives and their health.  I didn’t know anything at all about the Hanford project during the war and have spent a lot of time since I finished the book reading articles about it.  I found this to be a very disturbing piece of American history that still has repercussions today. 

Buy The Hanford Necklace at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything, but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.

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