Product Description

Twelve-year-old Emily Watson's story is a shocking, compassionate re-creation of daily life for the urban poor one hundred years ago. At the dingy, overcrowded Acme Garment Factory, Emily Watson stands for eleven hours a day clipping threads from blouses. Every time the boss passes, he shouts at her to snip faster. But if Emily snips too fast, she could ruin the garment and be docked pay. If she works too slowly, she will be fired. She desperately needs this job. Without the four dollars a week it brings, her family will starve. When a reporter arrives, determined to expose the terrible conditions in the factory, Emily finds herself caught between the desperate immigrant girls with whom she works and the hope of change. Then tragedy strikes, and Emily must decide where her loyalties lie. With Factory Girl, Barbara Greenwood returns to the unique hybrid of fact and fiction that earned her acclaim for The Last Safe House, A Pioneer Thanksgiving and others. The life of working children in North American cities in the early part of the twentieth century directly inspired young Emily's story. Her fictional experiences are interwoven with nonfiction sections describing family life in a slum, the fight to improve social conditions, the plight of working children then and now, and much more. Rarely seen archival photos accompany this story of the past as only Barbara Greenwood can tell it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239374 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8–The year is 1912, and Emily Watson has every reason to hope that she will complete her 8th-grade education and enter one of the occupations newly opened to women–clerk, nurse, maybe even teacher. That is, until her father's letters abruptly stop and her family is thrown into poverty. The 12-year-old is forced to seek employment in a sweatshop, snipping garment threads for four dollars a week. The work is brutal; she stands in place 11 hours a day, unable to speak to anyone, surrounded by filth and rats, danger, cruel bosses, and the constant din of the machines. Yet, Emily's job keeps her family from starvation. This compelling look at child labor is interspersed with excellent photographs and detailed information about this troubling time in our nation's history. Greenwood describes not only the poverty that Emily and her family experience, but also explains its causes and hints at its cure. Interspersed with excellent-quality archival photos, this title is sure to spur discussion of many contemporary movements, including immigration, women's and worker's rights, and health care reform, but be aware that it is classified as fiction.–Tracy H. Chrenka, Forest Hills Public Schools, Grand Rapids, MI
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
This compelling book blends the horrific facts of child labor during the early twentieth century with the imaginary story of one underage factory girl. At 12, Emily is two years under the legal working age, but to help her desperate family, she takes a job in a sweatshop, where she suffers under horrific working conditions. At first she is scared to protest, but public pressure to improve conditions builds, thanks to union activists, social reformers (including Jane Addams), and journalists. The fiction about Emily is contrived, even intrusive. It's the history that is riveting (some drawn from testimony at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory trial), though, unfortunately, there's no documentation. However, the spacious photo-essay book design, clear prose, and unforgettable, captioned photos by Lewis Hines, Jacob Riis, and others bring close the drama of the children (especially girls) as well as the work of the reformers and activists who fought for change. Who needs the fiction? Link this to nonfiction books such as Russell Freedman's Kids at Work (1994). Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Interspersed with excellent-quality archival photos, this title is sure to spur discussion of many contemporary movements

Factory Girl succeeds where so many similar books fail: it is an educational book that manages to be both compelling and eye-opening.

Customer Reviews

A beautifully written weaving of historical fact and fiction
This was a fantastic book. It is reminiscent of the American Girl Series in that the fact-based fictional character is an independent, progressively-minded girl of her time period, and in the way historical facts and photos are woven in with the fictional text. However, it is written in a much more sophisticated manner than the American Girl books, and provides more depth of information. We have read several of Barbara Greenwood's other books as well, and they are similarly beautifully written and illustrated.

Good book
I got this for my 8 year old granddaughter. She read it straight through without putting it down. She had never thought a book could be so real.