I’d like to thank all the people who helped make The Physicists’ Daughter happen. Tony Ain, Erin Garmon, Michael Garmon, Amanda Evans, Rachel Broughten, Anne Hawkins, Moses Cardona, Barbara Peters, Paolo Amoroso, and Adam Hyland read it in manuscript, and their comments were incredibly enlightening. Paolo and Adam, in particular, were hugely helpful in helping me contextualize this fictional narrative with the real-life history of science and technology. My sister Suzanne Quin, who earned her PhD in chemistry with a dissertation on separation methods, helped me with the history of mass spectroscopy and listened to me burble when I found an affordable first edition of J. J. Thomson’s Recollections and Reflections on eBay. Kali Martin, a research historian at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, provided valuable assistance to my efforts to learn about the activities of Higgins Industries’ Carbon Division. The National WWII Museum’s collection of oral histories let me hear the voices of women working on the home front during World War II, and its wartime photographs of the Michaud plant helped me visualize Justine’s workplace. The WPA’s 1938 New Orleans City Guide gave me a roughly contemporaneous glimpse of Justine’s hometown, including the nightlife depicted in my imaginary TickTock Club. Jerry Strahan’s book, Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats that Won World War II, gave me insight into Andrew Higgins’s innovative designs and into the hard work of the people who made them real. These people helped me avoid many errors, and any that slipped through the process are all mine.
As always, I am grateful for the people who help me get my work ready to go out into the world, the people who send it out into the world, and the people who help readers find it. Many thanks go to my agent, Anne Hawkins, and to the wonderful people at Sourcebooks and Poisoned Pen Press who do such a good job for us, their writers. Because I can trust that my editors, Anna Michels and Diane DiBiase, and my copy editor, Beth Deveny, will help me make my work shine, I can stretch myself creatively and try new things. That’s a wonderful place for a writer to be, especially when writing something as different from my previous books as this one is. Molly Waxman, Mandy Chahal, and Anna Venckus do an amazing job marketing my work and helping it find new readers. I’m also grateful to the University of Oklahoma for providing the opportunity for me to teach a new generation of authors while continuing to write books of my own.
And, of course, I am always (always!) grateful for you, my readers.