Toxic, radioactive material infecting girls, mostly teenagers, daily, without the girls knowing about it. In The Radium Girls, the horrors that girls who worked in radium factories faced in the 1920s in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois. These factories used radium to create watches that had glowing dials, and the young girls working there painted these dials using a method which involved them putting the paintbrushes in their mouths. The paintbrushes had radium on them, and this toxic material was going straight into the workers' systems. The book describes the girls' daily lives inside and outside of work, and how it drastically changed after the effects of radium started to haunt them with different symptoms. The book follows the fight that the girls fought, for justice for themselves and their fellow workers.
This book has to be one of my favorite non-fiction books that I have ever read. The way it was told was leaning very fictional, but it was true which gave the details even more depth, knowing that people really experience the terrible things they did. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of fiction and wants to try a non-fiction book or anyone looking for an interesting story that they haven’t heard of before. Overall, I really did enjoy reading this book, but I would advise readers about the graphic details and that it is a bit of a slow starter.