Book Bearings
The Hired Girl
- 400 pages · about 7 hours
- First published 2015
- 11 editions
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1 About this book
Ever since the untimely death of her mother, 14 year-old Joan Skraggs has been desperately unhappy. Under the thumb of her cruel father and three sullen brothers, Joan lives like a servant on their farm just outside of Lancaster, forever cooking, cleaning, and attending to the many demands of the home.
But she has little freedom, and less support from her family for her love of reading and blossoming interest in education. But when her father tells Joan she can't go to school anymore, it sets off a journey that will see her become first a runaway, then a hired girl on $6 a week, and finally her very own young woman.
Set in America during the optimistic years before the First World War, and told through a series of journal entries, The Hired Girl is the story of a young girl in search of Real Life and True Love.
- Historical fiction
- United states, history
- Women household employees
- Diaries
- Authorship
- Farm life
- Young adult fiction
- Young adult works
2 What to expect
A historical novel for teens, told as the 1911 diary of fourteen-year-old Joan, who runs away from her father's Pennsylvania farm and finds work as a hired girl in a city household. Her voice is earnest, bookish and often funny, and through it the book explores class, education, faith and first love. It is long and leisurely, rich in period detail, with a naive narrator who makes mistakes and learns from them.
3 About Laura Amy Schlitz
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 Similar books
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
- A history of New York by Washington Irving
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens