The Cassandra

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In the 1940’s Mildred Groves lives at home with her oppressive mother and catty and mean sister but runs away from home to join a facility in Oregon that works on the Atom bomb. She is blessed but mostly cursed with an ability to see the future. It causes her to hallucinate and sleepwalk and contributes to people thinking that she is crazy. At the camp, she makes friends and proves her value even while not quite being seen as an equal with her male colleagues. But it is still better than living at home, though the weapon they are about to unleash will bring an evil on the world that cannot be contained.

The Cassandra was classified SCI-FI by my local library, but the science fiction is a very small part of this story, like a small trace of it seeped in to make the character something more than a beleaguered woman living in the 1940s. What this story takes a view on a historical event and shows it from another angle.

There are some developments in this book that could very well make some people uncomfortable. It might even lapse into shocking.

We have led the world to environmental ruin, wars, devastation, destruction, racism, hatred, poverty, overcrowding, and a whole host of awful things. I don’t think it is unreasonable to point at men and say “you did this.”

And ultimately our protagonist learns the secret of surviving this ugly world: you have to stop giving a shit, especially about other people. Kinda like a man.

I can definitely see reasons to love it or hate it, in equal measure. The main character is kinda batshit. There are certainly things that drive her toward that. Her helplessness and entrapment and her crushing visions of the future could not be more stark and depressing. But this is the kind of story that probably isn’t told enough. In the real life narrative which paradoxically says “those bombs saved lives” there is a corresponding narrative that is also true: with the action of dropping the first atom bombs against a country that had none, we unleashed a terrible force upon the world.
We did that, and it worked. But The Cassandra forces us to take responsibility for the pain that it caused humanity.

(I went back and forth on this one. I started at three stars then wanted to give it four but I think it most accurately would fall into 3 and a half.)

This book is very dark, and it only gets darker as it goes along. It is difficult and ultimately unsettling. And I think that is exactly the point.







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