Gregarious, erudite, and edgy, Eden Unger Bowditch still possesses the air of a streetwise Baltimorean even after a five-year absence. Before moving to Cairo in 2006, Bowditch worked as an editor for Urbanite and a freelancer for various publications including City Paper; she also authored three books about Baltimore history. In late January, with revolutionary gunfire beginning to sound outside her windows, Bowditch wrapped up work on The Atomic Weight of Secrets, her young-adult fiction novel.

Meticulously composed and edited, Secrets weaves together the stories of five inventive wunderkinds circa 1903. The children were taken from their homes and plopped into a schoolhouse in Dayton, Ohio. Once there, the kids—all spawn of scientific bigwigs—contrive to escape from their ominous guardians. Bowditch incorporates bits of mechanical detail into the story that call to (the adult) mind a time when the gears of one’s imagination whirled without impediment, unencumbered by thoughts of mortgages or credit scores. Secrets is not untethered from reality, though; its science- and fact-based narrative serves as a counterweight to the abundance of fantasy and magic in young-adult fiction.

Before the start of her Baltimore book tour, Bowditch regaled City Paper with stories from here and abroad and discussed the intersection of young adult fiction and research.

City Paper: How did you come to live in Egypt?

Eden Unger Bowditch: Nate, my husband, went to [Johns] Hopkins [University] for grad school. He got his doctorate in 2005 and taught at Loyola for a year. Both of us lived in Europe as kids, so we thought it’d be really great to live abroad. Sort of jokingly, this job at the American University in Cairo came up and I said, ‘Apply for it. Why not?’ And he did and they offered him the job, and we had to decide, ‘Do we really go?’ And in a sense, it’s an adventure and it’s only a two-year commitment [so] we thought, Why not?

CP: Tell me about living there through the revolution.

EUB: Well, first of all, living in Cairo is way safer than any American city. I let the kids run around town on their own, and it’s fine. Every once in a while you hear a story like maybe somebody tried to touch someone’s arm. And then there was one guy who was running around town trying to steal purses off women’s shoulders. That was huge—all over the ex-pat community people were freaking out. . . . And then the revolution [started], the government had sanctioned thuggery going on and hired marauding hordes [were] coming in and smashing windows. Our car was stolen—hundreds of cars were stolen. That happened, but that’s eased off and there’s nothing against ex-pats, Americans or Europeans. It’s really an internal revolution.

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