The Hired Girl
2015
- women household employees
- diaries
- authorship
- farm life
- young adult fiction
- hired help
- young adult works
- teen fiction
- diary fiction
- historical fiction
The story
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. It takes in feminism and housework; money, religion, and social class; literature and education, romanticism and realism, first love and sexual yearnings, cats, hats, and bunions. And it's a comedy.
What it’s like
Written as a diary, the prose is first-person and chatty, a fourteen-year-old's voice that swings from sulky resentment to giddy self-mockery, with lots of lists, asides, and misspelled bravado. The sensory world sits in ordinary things: scrubbed kitchen tables, bread and bacon grease, the cold of a farmhouse before dawn, the smell of boarding-house laundry, the weight of a borrowed book. It reads like a cozy, warm-hearted rainy-Sunday book with a wry edge, comic and tender in equal measure, with a bittersweet undertow about money, class, and a girl's hunger for an education. Pacing is brisk and episodic, each entry short enough to read in one sitting, and the emotional register stays light even when hardship bites. Its heroine moves from a bullied, overworked daughter toward self-possession and a clearer sense of who she wants to be. Intensity is low: some cruelty from her father and brothers, mild talk of romance and first crushes, no violence on the page beyond the occasional sharp slap, and no graphic content. It suits readers who want a funny, humane coming-of-age story, especially those who love diary-form historical fiction and clever young narrators.
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