The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
Dewey Kerrigan is an eleven-year-old budding Einstein. The other girls in her class, with their giggling and boy talk, don’t interest her half as much as the experiments she reads about in The Boy Mechanic. Now her scientist dad has taken a top-secret job in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Dewey is going to join him. She has no idea what he’s working on, all she knows is that her father and his colleagues are developing a “gadget” that is supposed to end the WWII. No one knows the details, but anything that will end the war has got to be good, right? Even if you think you know how this story goes, Klages’ creative, thought-provoking ending will haunt you. And I wasn’t the only one who was impressed! Klages scored the 2007 Scott O’Dell award for best historical youth fiction.