Guest Post: Then Came The Summer Snow by Trisha T. Pritikin
- Archaeolibrarian
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
Book details:
Book Title: Then Came the Summer Snow
Series: n/a
Author Name: Trisha T. Pritikin
Publication Date: September 15th, 2025
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Press
Pages: 328
Genre: Historical Fiction / Dark Humor / Atomic Feminism
Any Triggers: misogynist culture of 1950s; no violence, but cancers in children are a focus, and thyroid cancer treatment.
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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.
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available in #KindleUnlimited,
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).
“Then Came the Summer Snow is like an unexpected gift in its surprise and freshness. Absurdity informs its realism, its poignancy, and its humor. A troubling, hilarious, weird, and wonderful novel.” Mark Spencer, author of An Untimely Frost
The eerie tick of a Geiger Counter provides the warning 1950s soundtrack for Trisha Pritikin’s novel about Hanford, a closely guarded atomic city in Washington state where plutonium for the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki was made during World War II. Pritikin, born in the shadow of Hanford’s Cold War weapons plants whose father was a Hanford plant manager and whose infant brother lies buried in a baby grave plot in Richland, tells a compelling story of how an initially naïve couple, Edith and Herb Higgenbothum, dealt with secrecy, spies and classified documents while worrying about a growing thyroid cancer in the neck of their 10-year old son, and how a group of angry mothers organized by Edith finally hit back when Hanford officials’ reassurances about their children’s safety could no longer be trusted. Karen Dorn Steele, Stanford University graduate and a former investigative reporter for The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Spokane, Washington who broke many of the stories about the Hanford “downwinders” unknowingly exposed to radiation from Hanford’s nuclear weapons plants
'Have you ever had a personal experience with the medical world that influenced your story?'
Those of us who were exposed as infants and children to low-dose ionizing radiation downwind of US atomic production sites (like Hanford) or testing sites (like the Nevada Test Site) have developed the same cancers and other illnesses. Fallout is fallout, whether from a production or testing site.
The difficult issue is that there are currently no “biomarkers” that I know of that identify a cancer or other disease found in radiation-exposed populations as having been caused specifically by radiation exposure rather than something else. A radiation exposure biomarker is a measurable substance in an organism whose presence is indicative of some environmental radiation exposure.
To find biomarkers of radiation exposure, exposed populations would have to be studied at or near the time of exposure to determine exposure dose and substance to which they were exposed. Port mortem studies might determine common biological markers in people exposed to certain levels of certain radionuclides. These studies would be costly and difficult, and, for this reason and because the nuclear industry would rather not have the public aware of exposure and health outcomes, these studies have not been done. The result? Few if any biomarkers.
Following low-dose radiation exposure, something called a “latency period” occurs. A latency period can extend over decades before a person exposed to low-dose ionizing radiation develops the first symptoms of the thyroid disease, cancer, or other radiogenic problem that has resulted from earlier exposure to fallout. In radiation exposure litigation, the defendant (nuclear industry) often argues that thyroid cancer, other cancers, and other diseases may have been caused in plaintiffs by pesticide exposure, or other intervening factors, rather than by radiation exposure.
The only way those of us with thyroid cancer and other thyroid and parathyroid diseases have been able to prove that it is more likely than not that fallout (I-131) exposure caused the diseases we have developed is through admission of epidemiological studies of populations exposed to I-131 (radioactive iodine) released from atomic weapons tests (e.g, Trinity Test in New Mexico, thermonuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, Nevada test Site tests) and nuclear reactor accidents (e.g., Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island) as evidence of causation in thef litigation. These studies show a statistically significant increase in incidence of thyroid disease and thyroid cancer in I-131 exposed populations at these sites.
For the vast range of other biologically significant radionuclides released as byproducts of plutonium production, or from a-bomb tests, these studies have, for the most part, not been conducted.
Trisha is an internationally known advocate for fallout-exposed populations downwind of nuclear weapons production and testing sites. She is an attorney and former occupational therapist.
Trisha was born and raised in Richland, the government-owned atomic town closest to the Hanford nuclear weapons production facility in southeastern Washington State. Hanford manufactured the plutonium used in the Trinity Test, the world’s first test of an atomic bomb, detonated July 16,1945 at Alamogordo, NM, and for Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that decimated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Beginning in late 1944, and for more than forty years thereafter, Hanford operators secretly released millions of curies of radioactive byproducts into the air and to the waters of the Columbia River, exposing civilians downwind and downriver. Hanford’s airborne radiation spread across eastern Washington, northern Oregon, Idaho, Western Montana, and entered British Columbia.
Trisha suffers from significant thyroid damage, hypoparathyroidism, and other disabling health issues caused by exposure to Hanford’s fallout in utero and during childhood. Infants and children are especially susceptible to the damaging effects of radiation exposure.
Trisha’s first book, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, published in 2020 by the University Press of Kansas, has won multiple awards, including San Francisco Book Festival, 1st place (history); Nautilus Silver award (journalism and investigative reporting); American Book Fest Book Awards Finalist (US History); Eric Hoffer Awards, Shortlist Grand Prize Finalist; and Chanticleer International Book Awards, 1st Place, (longform journalism). The Hanford Plaintiffs was released in Japanese in 2023 by Akashi Shoten Publishing House, Tokyo.
Author Links:
Website: www.trishapritikin.com
Twitter / X: https://x.com/TrishaPritikin
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/triesq/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Trisha-T.-Pritikin/author/B086WVVNTY
Atomic Heritage Foundation Interview: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/trisha-pritikin/
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
Thank you so much for hosting Trisha Pritikin today, with such a fascinating and moving guest post linked to her compelling novel, Then Came The Summer Snow. Much appreciated.
Take care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club