The Girls Who Glowed in the Dark
A Novel of the Radium Dial Painters

About this book:

They called it Undark—a miracle powder that turned watch faces into eternal constellations and made the girls who painted them glow like fireflies in the New Jersey night. At the United States Radium Corporation, seventeen-year-old Mollie Maggia and her friends earned enviable wages, wore silk stockings, and laughed as they dusted their hair and painted their teeth with the luminous paste, swallowing a little more of it with every precise brushstroke. *Lip, dip, paint.* It was a rhythm, a livelihood, a modern fairy tale—until the fairy tale began to rot their bones from the inside out.

With the intimate velocity of a novel and the weight of forgotten history, *The Girls Who Glowed in the Dark* follows the dial painters of Newark and Orange from the sunlit studios of 1921 into the courtroom battles that forced a nation to confront the cost of its own progress. Here are the women who glittered at dance halls and the doctors who dismissed their crumbling jaws as "industrial hysteria"; the company men who hid behind trade secrets and the lawyers who raced the half-life of radium to win justice before the last witness turned to dust.

Lyrical, unflinching, and fiercely human, this is the story of the young women who lit the world's darkest corners and paid for it with their lives—a testament to the courage that burns brightest when the lights go out.