Then Came The Summer Snow

2025 | Fiction & Poetry

Edith Higgenbothum is a 1950s housewife and mother in the “atomic town” of Richland, Washington. Edith’s husband, Herbert, is an engineer at Hanford, a secretive federal atomic weapons facility just north of town. Edith’s world, which is enshrouded in the myths, prejudices, and delusions of 1950s America, is thrown into turmoil and fear when her son Herbie powers up his father’s uranium prospecting Geiger counter. The device emits an ear-shattering barrage of clicks, revealing that the milk in a nearby glass is radioactive.

When Herbie is diagnosed with thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine in the milk, Edith allies with other mothers whose children are the victims of “summer snow” and other forms of radioactive fallout from plutonium production and A-bomb tests. Edith embarks on a quest pitting her against the Atomic Energy Commission and other power brokers who value atomic secrecy over the health of communities, all in the name of national security.

What’s at stake is no less than the lives of children.

In Trisha Pritikin’s crisp and sweeping novel, the Cold War comes home to live with a family in Richland, Washington. Not the Cold War of ideologies, but the one that included 2,000+ nuclear tests, and the production of hundreds of tons of plutonium; that contaminated our homes, food and communities; that actually took family members. Robert “Bo” Jacobs, Emeritus Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Hiroshima City University, author of Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale 2022).

Trisha T. Pritikin (Author)