The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

This is a fiction book with a very novel premise. Marylou Ahearn lost her daughter, Helen, when she was 8. Marylou attributes Helen’s death to a radioactive drink she had at her doctor’s office when she was pregnant. It is now more than 50 years later and Marylou is obsessed with finding and killing the doctor in charge of that unbelievable study to give pregnant women radioactive drinks.

Dr. Wilson Spriggs was in charge of the study. He’s now living in Florida with his daughter, her husband, and their three children. Marylou moves to their neighborhood in Florida, changes her name, and insinuates herself into their lives. She first approaches Suzi, their youngest daughter, while out on a walk. Soon she is over at their house quite a lot. Suzi is vulnerable because she feels her mother, Caroline, never pays her attention. The two older children, Otis and Ava, have Asperger’s. Caroline spends most of her attention on Ava while Otis is left to his own devices, which involve a lot of science experiments in the backyard shed.

The story seems to take some incredible turns, but it is enthralling. It is unclear to Marylou if Wilson Spriggs remembers the study at all.

“Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot.”

So, Marylou turns her attention to the rest of the family, but much of the trouble that ensues is due to the problems in the family in the first place. An affair, a hurricane, a pedophile and, least-likely, a home-built breeder reactor all overwhelm the family and Marylou.

Incredibly, the two most unbelievable events in this fiction book are actually based on real life. I’m trying to track down Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files, which details studies that actually took place at Vanderbilt University where pregnant women were given radioactive cocktails. And, I’m currently reading The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. This is a non-fiction book about a high school boy who got enough of a start on building a reactor in his shed that an EPA clean-up crew in full protective gear descended on his neighborhood. They’d discovered radiation high enough to endanger 40,000 nearby residents.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

This is an easy, quick read with a very pointed message. The author, a Yale law professor, believes that pushing kids to be their best, whatever the tactics, is a superior parenting practice. She calls this type of parenting “Chinese parenting” as opposed to “Western parenting”.

It is a lot of work to parent this way. She spends hours after school drilling the children or forcing them to practice their musical instruments. She picks them up at school during non-essential classes (in her opinion) like PE or music or art to do more practicing. She has two girls. The eldest, Sophia, adapts relatively well to this parenting strategy. At fourteen, Sophia plays the piano at Carnegie Hall.

“Once, Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth-grade teacher administered every Friday…. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time.”

I have to wonder if every child had a parent pushing them to succeed and was so utterly invested in their success what our nationwide test scores would look like. Sophia recently was admitted to both Harvard and Yale. Of course, she was never allowed to have a playdate, go to a sleepover, try out for a play, watch TV or get anything lower than an A.

There is another side. Lulu, the author’s other child, does not take so well to the threatening parenting style. Here’s one episode when she’s seven years old.

“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years….. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic."

Can you imagine? The child is seven. Lulu continues playing an instrument though she does switch to the violin and eventually quits at age 13. She takes up tennis. I wonder what she will do next. In the scheme of things her rebellion was small, as her grades at school were still excellent.

The author emphasizes that all her actions were done out of love and that her children knew that. She has come in for a lot of flack as to whether she was emotionally abusing them. I think she has a point about developing a work ethic in children, but her tactics seem pretty extreme. Plus, how does she have the time to do this?

You can hear an interview with the author on NPR here. Or listen to other moms discussing her parenting tactics, also on NPR.