Photo courtesy Ciera Horton McElroy/Facebook
'Atomic Family' launches at Zeppelin Books in Orlando Saturday
Boomers grew up crouching under their school desks as a futile technique of protecting themselves from atomic bombs; Gen-Xers grew up with both the understanding that “duck and cover” drills were a joke and the certainty that a nuclear war would happen in our lifetime But Atomic Family was written by a member
of Gen Z, UCF grad Ciera Horton McElroy, and we must admit we are curious to see how the half-life of nuclear anxiety fares in this fourth generation to grow up with The Bomb.
Like a radioactive isotope, it seems that fear mutates rather than steadily decaying and decreasing; McElroy’s novel deals with the environmental effects of buried nuclear waste — both the title and the plot play on the hidden secrets within the average nuclear family — a sadly not-fictional consequence currently playing out in the waterways of the South.
The book is out Feb. 28, but you can get an early copy and get it signed by the author, too, at this reading. Maybe she’ll throw in an anecdote about Tritagator and Dioxinator, the two radioactive alligators currently living in the Savannah River.
6 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 11, Zeppelin Books, 885 N. Orange Ave., zeppelinbookstore. com, $7.
