Bread and Roses, Too (review)

The 1912 strike in the Lawrence, Massachusetts woollen mills finds Mama and Anna, the two breadwinners of the Serutti family, out among the protesters, young Rosa Serutti near frantic for their safety, and life-hardened Jake Beale little better than a street urchin now that he has no paycheck to bring home to his abusive, alcoholic father. Rosa and Jake's lives brush briefly when she grudgingly allows him to spend a couple of nights in their cramped but heated rooms—a kindness he repays by swiping some of their food. Later, the two are thrown together again when many of the strikers' children are sent to out-of-town host families to avoid the growing hostilities, and Rosa and Jake end up in Vermont in the care of Italian stonecutter Mr. Gerbati and his wife, Rosa under her mother's orders and Jake as a stowaway under an assumed name. Roughly the first half of the novel revolves around the strike and Rosa's anxieties, with walk-on appearances by labor leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and "Big Bill" Haywood, while the second half shifts to life at the Gerbatis and Jake's ambivalence toward the couple, who offer him both the care and the strict discipline he has never experienced. An awkward supporting cast and a deliriously happy ending are less than convincing; moreover, with backstory about the wage cuts that ignited the strike relegated to endnotes, Paterson dodges the irony of how protective legislation that promises long-term benefits to women and children can result in short-term havoc to individual families' means of support. Nonetheless, she remains a smooth storyteller, and this is an informative exploration of a key moment in U.S. labor history. While this title isn't up to the standard of Lyddie (BCCB 2/91) or Auch's Ashes of Roses (BCCB 7/02), it may get younger readers launched on labor problem fiction.