The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Title: The Only Harmless Great Thing
Series: n/a
Author: Brooke Bolander
Source/Format: Tor.com ebook club; eBook
More Details: Alternative History; Science Fiction
Publisher/Publication Date: Tor.com; January 23, 2018 

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.

These are the facts.

Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.

I’m steadily making my way through all of the old Tor.com ebook club freebie titles that I haven’t read. The next one I wanted to mark off my TBR list this year was this one.

If, like me, you’ve read a book called The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women—Kate Moore’s eye-opening historical nonfiction about the women who worked at radium-dial factories—then you can already guess the exact kind of tragedies that take place in Brooke Bolander’s 2018 novella, The Only Harmless Great Thing.

I was hooked, and I quickly got invested in some of the cast of characters. But that was because I found the side of the story that took place in the past particularly riveting—including the perspective of Topsy, and the other elephant related passages. I wanted to root for them, and I wanted it to work out. But, going into the novella, I knew it wasn’t going to be that kind of story. This one, through its tragedy, was about the message, but that’s exactly what made The Only Harmless Great Thing memorable for me. And, as I was reading it, I was strongly reminded of my experience with The Radium Girls. The story was very good in a lot of respects, as a work of fiction. But it also captured the same infuriating tone and behavior—just like the actual history it was partially based on—with the injustice of the situation and the open callousness of the people in charge.

At the end of the day, The Only Harmless Great Thing was meaningful and poignant, and I'm glad I finally read it.