A Girl’s Guide to Missiles: Growing Up in America’s Secret Desert

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.)