Library Journal
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Piper (literature, geography, Univ. of Missouri; The Price of Thirst) offers her most personal work to date with this part autobiography, part American history, centered on her childhood in China Lake, CA. A premier location for U.S. weapons and armaments research, the Naval Air Weapons Station is where Piper's aeronautical engineer father worked on the Sidewinder missile, and where her mother later helped to develop the Tomahawk missile. Piper and her sister came of age in America's secret desert, where even now those who visit the base for petroglyph tours have to take care not to set off unexploded ordinances left behind on the still-active bombing range. While the story goes well beyond the author's childhood, Piper weaves in her yearslong quest to find out more about her father; from the work he did at China Lake to the secret missions he flew in Operation Sonnie during World War II. VERDICT At times heartbreaking and rife with dry humor, this highly recommended narrative will interest fans of memoir, coming-of-age stories, and family histories.-Crystal Goldman, Univ. of -California, San Diego Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A smart, self-aware memoir of life in a Cold War outpost.If you're a government agency, there are three reasons to hide your activities from public view: because they really need to be kept secret, because the activities are fundamentally useless, or because "you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever." So an official told Piper (Literature and Geography/Univ. of Missouri; The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos, 2014, etc.) in what amounts to a mantra for all of China Lake, a test facility in the hottest, most forbidding part of the Mojave Desert. The author writes of a childhood spent in a household headed by two project workers at China Lake. It was a world of missiles and launches and secrets in a time when the world seemed to be falling to bitsthere was Vietnam, for one thing, and then the Manson family zipping around in the nearby desert in their dune buggies ("The Mansons even shopped at our 7-Eleven in Ridgecrest, where Christine and I bought our candy"). By Piper's account, it was a preternaturally strange place in a strange time punctuated by Amway rallies and enlivened with unhealthy spats of interoffice politics. But interesting things happened there, too, including experiments to turn the weather into a weapon, to say nothing of the business of turning hardscrabble China Lake, a place of prewar brothels and hermits, into a place suitable for straight-arrow military personnel, civilian contractors, and their families. Piper's account moves among the personal and the universal, with fine small coming-of-age moments. The narrative threatens to unravel a little when, following her father's death, Piper acts on clues he left behind to follow his footsteps in other arenas of the Cold War, but she pulls everything into an effectiveand affectingwhole meant to "ensure that history was not erased."A little-known corner of the Atomic Age comes into focus through Piper's skilled storytelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

For designing and detonating missiles, China Lake was perfect a desert wasteland within driving distance of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But for Piper's family, life at the military base was full of secrets and challenges, as she reveals in this fascinating memoir. The family moved there when Piper was a girl, so that her father, a WWII veteran, could work on the Sidewinder missile. Eventually, they all got into the missile business, her mother helping create circuit boards after taking a class for housewives and Piper herself working as a clerk in the summers. War surrounded them at China Lake, where streets were named after admirals, ships, and combat zones. But Piper was not allowed to know much of what went on there, even the work her own parents were doing, and years later she returned in search of answers. Here she offers an incredible view of a little-known community, from WWII all the way through 9/11, and examines how her family navigated life in a town built for war.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2010 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
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Piper (The Price of Thirst) chronicles her coming-of-age in this affecting memoir about growing up in the 1970s on a naval missile testing base in California's Mojave Desert. When her father, a WWII veteran, suddenly lost his job as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, he moved his wife and two daughters to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, where he landed a job after six months. Throughout Piper's charming narrative looms the threat of nuclear war, Watergate, and concerns about UFOs. "I grew up in the age of missiles, which are essentially rockets with brains," she writes. As a youth Piper embraced her Christian upbringing and insisted she attend the Immanuel Christian middle school; in high school she embraced the Reaganite iteration of "Make American Great Again." Later, she questioned her faith and examined China Lake's history, including the prominent and underappreciated role women played on the missile base working alongside their male counterparts. She eventually attended graduate school in Eugene, Ore., where she took classes in literature and feminism, and left the Republican Party. This is a fascinating look at growing up in Cold War America, as told by a sharp and affable narrator. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.