In October of 1942, four Kesterson children - Martha, Jesse, Helen and Ruth - came home from their Anderson County schools with surprising instructions: Don't come back. That's because their schools, Scarborough School and Robertsville School, were closing. Life as they knew it was grinding to a halt in their farming community, Lupton Crossroad, and on all the other farms in the roughly 60,000 surrounding acres.

Soon a letter arrived informing the children's parents, Sam and Mary Kesterson, that the family had two weeks to move. They were among about 900 Tennessee families displaced by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government operation that would develop the atomic bomb and found what became the city of Oak Ridge.

Rebecca Carroll, the daughter of Jesse Kesterson, has released a novel inspired by the family's experience. "Milk Glass Moon" is about a 14-year-old girl's experience of being displaced by the Manhattan Project and her gradual understanding of what the government was doing. "I wanted people to know the pre-Oak Ridge story and to know about the people who had to leave. They did their part and their story was never told," said Carroll, who now teaches English at Pellissippi State Technical Community College.

The move itself became the grist of family legends. On New Year's Day, 1943, a horse-drawn wagon with livestock plodding alongside moved chickens, furniture and a cast-iron cookstove to a two-story house in Coalfield, 20 miles away. The Kestersons, like all the displaced families, had combed areas like Deer Lodge, Harriman and Oliver Springs for housing. Carroll described her family's feelings as mixed. "My dad was eetheart and they had three children.

In a cruel twist of fate, her father, who worked at three plants at Oak Ridge, developed myelofibrosis, a cancer associated with beryllium used in one of the plants. He received a settlement, but died of the cancer when he was 78.

Life was not easy for Carroll either. She and her husband divorced, and then she remarried and divorced again. In 2002, she enrolled in the master's program in English at the University of Tennessee. There she took creative writing for the first time and it changed her life. "I took courses from Michael Knight and Allen Wier (both on the creative writing faculty) at UT. Milk Glass Moon was my creative thesis. I had never really had anyone critique my writing. They taught me a lot about writing, about showing and not telling," she said.

Carroll wrote the book in the summer of 2003. "I had done the research, and then I sat down and wrote the book very quickly." In the fall, she submitted the finished work to Knight and Wier. "Michael was director of my committee. I was really worried as to what Michael would think. I was afraid he would give it back and say it was garbage." Carroll said she ran into Knight one day on campus. "He said, 'I've finished your book.' I said, 'What did you think?' He said, 'I like it.' I about fell over." She said he suggested a number of changes, which she was willing to make.

She said her father liked the manuscript. "My dad said, "You got Mama good." Carroll's father did not live to see the book published.