Paterson, Katherine.
BREAD AND ROSES, TOO
New York : Clarion, 2006.
IL 5-8, RL 5.3
ISBN 0618654798

(2 booktalks)

We want bread.   Bread to feed our children.  We work and work in the mills and yet our children are starving.  The mill owners are getting rich and yet our children go to bed with empty stomachs.  We will strike.  We will not come to work until the mill owners give us higher wages.  It is 1912 and many of us are new to Lawrence and can't find any other jobs.  We have to feed our families and mill work is all we can find.  But the union organizers have promised us that they will help us.  They will feed us until we get a fair paycheck from the mill owners.  And maybe some respect too.  That's what we need.  We need bread but we need roses too.

Booktalk #2

Conditions of immigrant labor in the mills in Lawrence Mass in 1912 are the backdrop for a friendship between 12 year-old Rosa and 13 year-old Jake.  Rosa is in a family where the father has died in a mill accident and the mother and older sister are working at the mill for very poor wages.  Jake is working in a factory until it is closed because of the strike.  When the children are sent to Vermont to keep them safe, Jake jumps on the train with Rosa thinking he's going to New York.  In Vermont, Rosa continues her education and Jake learns to trust others.  A realistic view of the roles women and children played in the New England factories of the early 1900s  (New Hampshire Great Stone Face nominee, 2007-2008)