You can’t read about the plight of the poor and the immigrants and the sweatshops without making connections with today. Ultimately, this is a good fiction/non-fiction mashup that provides poignant insight into the terrifying world of a century ago. I felt like it was ill-timed commercial breaks: “And now, a word from Jacob Riis!” Eventually, I got used to it. I wanted to continue Emily’s story, and not be interrupted by the non-fiction. The jumps from fiction to non-fiction can be abrupt, and the first few times it happened, I didn’t like it. Interspersed with Emily’s story are non-fiction passages that make reference to the chapter of her story just finished-these include information about child labor in general, the garment factories and the various jobs that girls would have within them, the tenement neighborhoods, immigration, and social reformers. She’s caught in this horrible moment of history, where she wants to help her family, wants to be loyal, but is essentially being tortured to do it. She’s working to help support her family, and has an overseer that threatens her with dismissal with every huff. She’s only twelve years old, and earns less than five dollars a week. But that job is eleven hours a day, where she’s standing in a hot, airless room, with hundreds of other women. She works in a garment factory, and her job seems simple-just clipping threads from blouses. It can be jarring for some readers, but it presents a broader view of history than the historic fiction would on its own.įactory Girl is the story of Emily Watson, living in New York City in the early 1900s. Her method is to interweave a fictional story about a young person with interstitials and sidebars about historic events from the same time period. She’s written several other history books for young readers, including The Last Safe House: A Story of the Underground Railroad and Gold Rush Fever: A Story of the Klondike, 1898. One of the books we used this month was Factory Girl, by Barbara Greenwood. It’s a topic that’s usually undertaught in our schools for various reasons, and some of the resources we’ve found can help bring that past to light for kids. I’ve been working together with teachers in my school district to find new resources about the Progressive Era, and ways to teach that better to our students. Many of her short stories and articles have been published in the Canadian Children's Annual and educational anthologies. She has been president of CANSCAIP (Canadian Society of Children's Authors, Illustrators, and Performers) and has edited many CANSCAIP publications. She taught elementary school for many years and, later, taught creative writing to high-school and adult students. Barbara Greenwood studied at the University of Toronto. The reams of research "left-over" from her first two books was used in A Pioneer Story, an award-winning book which mixes fact, fiction, and hands-on activities as it delves into Ontario's past. The stories she creates are those she would have liked to read at age ten or twelve or fourteen. The information gleaned from her research becomes grist for the background details and settings of novels which emphasize character development and the human side of history. Now she immerses herself in the subject: reading old diaries, journals, and letters, visiting museums, doing in-depth research at libraries, visiting the areas where her books are set. When she was young she couldn't find novels about Canada's past. Inspired by her own early fascination with historical tales, author Barbara Greenwood specializes in writing historical fiction and biographies for children and young people.
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