I loved the premise of this book but it failed to do anything for me

Thank you Netgalley for a copy for an honest review

Another book that I desperately wanted to like but which just felt like a bit of a chore. I think it was just a little predictable in terms of plot and I did not connect to the characters however there were definite moments of warmth in and among and I can understand why many other readers enjoyed it. I think the whole marriage plot did not really interest me and I faded out before I reached the end. Since I was unable to be more positive, I will not publicise my review on my personal channels.

This book was not quite what I expected - from the splendid title and chapter names, I thought it would be more about the main character's study of birds. However it was not, being more about how she married an older man, her professor, moved across the country to be with him, and basically stayed in a marriage she was not happy in (apart from one fling with a younger man). I always find this a frustrating and sad thing, and while I realise that attitudes were different in those times (starts during the 1940s), it is always heartwrenching to read about a woman who lacks the courage or strength to walk away from a bad situation. I'm sorry to say that I skipped parts, and found it overall a bit tedious as there was not much of a plot.
Thanks to the publisher for a review copy.

a woman who planned to become an ornithologist makes a fateful decision -- to marry a man she loved -- and then her entire life is upended by that decision. predictably, the husband turns out to be a sexist pig and Meridian ends up having her entire life being defined by her husband's choices. wonderful writing, but the topic (gender roles) and the specifics (science / ornithology career) was almost too much for me (unemployed ornithologist) to read about.

3.5 stars. Hmmmmm...where do I start?

Briefly, this is the story of Meridian, an academically intelligent woman who falls in love with and marries one of her professors who is 20 years older than her. For him, she gives up a promising career to support him while he's working on the Manhattan Project. From the outset, it's clear that he's unemotional, selfish, self-absorbed and takes Meridian completely for granted. As the years go by, Meridian becomes resentful of all she has given up for him and they grow emotionally apart. Her only comforts for many years are her absorbing study of crow behaviour and a close relationship with her BFF. To say much more is to give away too much to those who haven't read it.

My expectations were that I would learn a lot about birds from this book but I really didn't. I felt frustrated with the staccato progression through years which sometimes flew by within a chapter. One minute we were in the late 1950s, the next it was 1968. She agrees to help a young local girl with her paper on bird behaviour and the very next sentence tells us she has graduated. I also felt that the product placement was unnatural and simply there to convince us that the author had done her research on whatever time period we were in. On the positive side, Meridian's growing awareness of the fight for women's equality reflects the experiences of many women of that time and the bitterness of young men who had been sent to fight in Vietnam was very well done.

I stayed with this book until the end because I wanted to know the outcome but I wasn't truly invested in it. Something didn't quite gel for me and overall it failed to deliver on its initial promise.

Huh. It's rare for me to read the typical "book club" picks, and rarer for me to enjoy them. But there is something about well-written books featuring scientific women in a time before women in STEM was encouraged. (I liked The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert in the same way.)

I guess my feminism and my love of science is my bias, so maybe people who don't share that won't share my views on the book. I don't know if this is a literary masterpiece, but I enjoyed the book so much that I definitely didn't know any possible issues in the writing.

I will say that I expected maybe a LITTLE more ornithology, but I did enjoy the start of each chapter, and the fact that Meridian finds the crows in Los Alamos and so could continue her observations.

I was sad for her, and Belle and Clay's arrival made me really happy. I feel they really provided growth for Meri.

At the same time I felt a little disappointed that Meri's views on the nuclear bombs and the fallout remained fairly rigid and that she insisted on separating herself from the young people she met. But maybe this is purposeful because I don't think Church intended to write a political statement and maybe Meri should be fallible, especially as she remained a product of her era.

What REALLY satisfied me was near the end, when Meridian addresses the lives of her peers directly, and impresses the fact that scientific women who gave up their careers are not less fully-formed for it. The kind of empathy expressed for women in an age who were so pressured by their communities, and sometimes gave in, is something I haven't seen before in a work of fiction. These women weren't made out to be weak for the decisions they made.

I loved this book. I did. I loved Marvella and Wingspan too, and I was left inspired.

A well plotted and somewhat maddening novel of the thwarted life of a very intelligent woman. Born in a time when women were 100% expected to kowtow to the wants and needs of their husbands, Meridan puts aside her well deserved scientific mind to play a bit part to her husband's world of physics. Stranded in Los Alamos, her struggles to keep herself feeling alive and relevant were heartbreaking.

Reading the synopsis on the back of the book , I was expecting a story full of adventure and a strong woman character. I got one, not the other unfortunately. There is no doubt that the lead character Meridian was strong in her own way but there was not much of a change of story.
I found that I got frustrated with her weaknesses along the way when she had so much potential - but maybe that was the purpose of the author to highlight how many potential geniuses of women have been lost in a world of dominating men.
The descriptions in the world encompass all of your senses and you are transported into Meridian's world from day one.
Nevertheless, I walk away with this book with a sense of profound sadness and anger but I hope that this will drive my motivation levels to make sure that this characters life is not an example of any young women's life in the future.

This is such a wide ranging book dealing with a wide span of time from the 1920 when Meridian is a young blue stocking to the 1970s and beyond as she looks back on her life. Her husband was involved in developing the nuclear bomb and then continues his work in New Mexico. We experience war, the effects of the bomb and Vietnam, the rise of the women's movement and, woven throughout, ornithology and in particular the intelligence of crows. Its an intelligent, wide ranging novel but readable and quirky. A romance with social history and birds. What's not to love.

I first loved him because he taught me the flight of a bird, precisely how it happens, how it is possible. Lift. Wing structure and shape, the concepts of wing loading, drag, thrust. The perfectly allotted tasks of each differently shaped feather. The hollowness of bones to reduce weight, to overcome gravity. I was too young to realize that what I really yearned to know was why birds take flight— and why, sometimes, they refuse.
The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church examines the delicate balance between love and duty and the multitude of ways each is present throughout life. Meridian is an intelligent woman whose love for birds transcended all other things in her early life.

That’s where my career as an ornithologist began— at the dinner table, beside the train tracks, in the late-night hours while my parents slept and I read lying in the empty bathtub. When I found a dead goldfinch on the walk home from school, my father applied the balm of Darwin to my broken heart.
As she grows she becomes more desperate to solidify her place in academia. She sets out to study ornithology- a field in the sciences that is, like most, male dominated, during a time that women are still the large minority in the universities.

The whole enterprise was far bolder than I. I concealed fears: near-certainty of my dire lack of qualifications and absolute certainty of my inability to fit in. The first day of classes, I rushed between buildings, the heavy, costly textbooks in the book bag bouncing off of my hip. In a gloomy, bell-jar-lined classroom in the zoology building, I sat near the front and watched men— all men— file in to join me. A few of them met my eyes, smiled tentatively. I saw clean-shaven cheeks and starched shirts, hastily tied Windsor knots. Some nodded, but none sat next to me.
As she struggles to find her place, she finds solace in a romance between a renowned physic's professor, Alden Whetstone. Her growing love for him helps to spark the topic for the final project of her academic career.

I knew my master’s thesis would be on crow behavior, the social aspects of the bird, but I also knew I needed to hone in on a narrower aspect of their social lives. I longed to know how, when, and why they formed allegiances and if those bonds crossed familial boundaries. I wanted to understand loyalty— to know if it derived solely from evolutionary advantage, or if it might also be motivated by something else, something akin to caring, love, and devotion.
Like her crows, when Alden is dispatched to Los Alamos, New Mexico for a top secret project (what is known to us now as the construction of the Atomic Bomb), Meri loyally follows her husband- giving up her studies, her degree and her dreams.

Men do. Women make do. We wait, patient Penelope at the hearth. We conform, good girls in girdles. We serve, suppressed sighs growing stale. We meld with oblivion, Flying ever in his slipstream.
Resentment and discontent slowly erode the foundation of Meridian and Alden's love. The pressure and weight of the truth behind Alden's work drive him deeper into his science while pushing Meri away because she so desperately wants to have a place in her community both scientific or otherwise.

In the gloom I heard his breath deepen, watched his shoulders release their tension. He’d said his piece at long last, and now he could relax. For me, any chance of sleep had vanished, and so I took my book, a blanket, and a pillow into the bathroom and climbed into the empty tub, just as I had when I was a girl. The hard sides of the bathtub seemed an appropriate place for me to lay my body that night— unforgiving and nonmalleable. I couldn’t concentrate, though. Finally, I pulled a hand towel from the rack, bit down on it, and used it to muffle my sobs. I let my shoulders spasm, felt the muscles of my lower back tighten into fists of pain.
To fill the void left by Alden's rejections Meri embarks on an attempt to rediscover her love for birds in the desert of New Mexico. She finds a lone group of crows and throws herself wholeheartedly into their study. In the desert she discovers more than just her love for ornithology- she finds her youth and sexuality in a young war veteran, Clay.

Nestled against Clay's naked body and drifting off to sleep that night, I thought about what Clay had told me about geologic rifts. That they were the earth pulling apart, like wounds opening. I wondered at the depth and mystery of it, a crack in the earth, in myself. Part of me recognized it as a potentially dangerous breach of my skin; another part of me relished the possibility for change that it posed, the powerful forces at work.
A poignant examination of family and the expectations therein The Atomic Weight of Love takes all the nuances of marriage, infidelity, feminism and self-worth in the 1940s and beyond and puts them under the microscope to be examined with true finesse and depth.

As I watched him, I wondered how many times a heart can heal. Are we allotted a specific number of comebacks from heartbreak? Or is that what really kills us, in the end— not strokes or cancer or pneumonia— but instead just one too many blows to the heart? Doctors talk of “cardiac insults”— such a perfect turn of phrase— but they know nothing of the heart, not truly.