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I've reached the end of part one and thought I'd add some comments - partly in reaction to what AnotherCat said about the author being a "populist writer" - as that really is an impression that has gotten stronger the more I've read.
As the first part progressed I was getting more and more frustrated by the way the author constantly described the girls' situations in full and sympathetic detail, while always painting the other side in much less personal terms and with deliberate allusion to suggest that they explicitly didn't care for the girls' fate. Things are rarely that simple.
One contrasting example is one of the girls had a father who also worked for USRC but didn't want to kick up a fuss and risk getting fired because he needed the job. We're supposed to have sympathy for this father who is acting as he does for financial reasons, but we're not to have sympathy for the people running USRC who might have been acting deceitfully also for financial reasons.
I say "might" because quite likely some of these people sincerely believed there was no problem with radium (just as some today sincerely believe human activity has not impacted climate). Several of the embellishments around Roeder would seem to hint that he cackles manically when we're not watching, but it's much harder to get that sense from the quoted material. I cannot but feel that the author is only telling me what she wants me to hear.
Which is NOT to say there wasn't a problem and the girls had nothing to complain about. I just think the author is giving me a very one-sided view of the situation. Perhaps, since it is so obvious, it was intentionally one sided, and in being so obvious maybe it's not supposed to be a real problem?
But we've now reached the point in the book where it seems the evidence is clear and unambiguous - but, as I suggested in my previous post, some people have already taken positions that they will find very hard to back away from, regardless of the evidence.
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