'The Hired Girl' by Laura Amy Schlitz

Schlitz, Laura Amy. The Hired Girl. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015. Print.

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I was familiar with Laura Amy Schlitz after reading her Newbery winning verse novel Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village, which I liked, but wasn't sure how much it would truly appeal to a middle grade reader outside a classroom situation where they were studying the Middle Ages.  The Hired Girl is another example of Schlitz's dedication to research, to depict the era honestly, without varnishing it under a romanticized patina.

The heroine of her novel is Joan Skraggs, a fourteen year-old girl, living on a Pennsylvania farm with her father and three brothers.  Her mother died several years before the beginning of the novel, but Joan cherishes her memory and zealously guards the escape hatch -- nearly thirty dollars -- her mother hid in her ragdoll's dress.  Joan's father has declared she is not to attend school anymore, something Joan loves more than almost anything.  She's bound and determined to be more than a farmer's wife, especially if it means she'll end up like her mother and work herself to death. Joan owns a grand total of three books: Ivanhoe, Jane Eyre, and Dombey and Son.  After Joan stands up to her father's intransigent behavior, he burns her precious books in retaliation, and Joan runs away from home with the idea that if she's going to do housework, she might as well get paid to do it, getting as far as Baltimore.  An encounter with a man she met on the train nearly ends in disaster for Joan, but she's soon rescued by Solomon Rosenbach.

Solomon is the younger son of Moritz Rosenbach, who owns a successful department store and Freyda Rosenbach.  Solomon also has two sisters -- Anna and Miriam -- and a younger brother, David, studying to be an artist.  As it turns out, the family needs a new maid, as their longtime maid, Malka, is getting older and needs help.  Mrs. Rosenbach agrees to take on Joan, who has reinvented herself as "Janet Lovelace," age eighteen.  Conflict ensues.  You see, the Rosenbachs are Jewish and Joan is Catholic.  Not only does Joan have to learn the intricacies of keeping kashrut (kosher), but her attempts to bring the Rosenbachs into the Catholic faith earn her the ire of Mrs. Rosenbach.  She also begins a friendship of sorts with the youngest Rosenbach child, Miriam, who's only twelve, but much more worldly than Joan, and more than a bit spoiled.  Joan is fortunate that Mr. Rosenbach believes it's his duty to educate all members of his household, so he gives the highly intelligent and thirsty for knowledge Joan free run of his library after the family has gone to bed.

Joan also has the opportunity to attend Mass regularly, and receive instruction in the Catholic faith, but to the surprise of the parish priest, she doesn't take Catholic teachings at face value and challenges them, using her own experiences with the Rosenbachs as evidence that not everything the priest has told her is completely true.

The action of the book comes to a head when Joan develops an intense crush on David, who is more than a bit of a flirt, and she's caught in his bedroom in the middle of the night.  Mr. Rosenbach must then decide if Joan is to stay in their house or leave without a reference.

The novel is presented as Joan's diary written over the course of four months. Schlitz does a great job of creating Joan's world, describing the amount of work that goes into cleaning a house in 1911. One scene that stands out is when Joan describes what it takes to clean the carpets to Mr. Rosenbach, while trying to persuade him to purchase an electric vacuum cleaner.  It will make you vow to never take your Hoover, Dyson, or Dirt Devil for granted ever again.  Schlitz doesn't dwell on the housework too much, but really, she doesn't have to.  It would get dull if she did, to be honest.  Housecleaning was a never-ending drudge in those days.  Schlitz only has to describe the effort it takes for Joan to iron one of Miriam's dresses or the amount of work to scrub the kitchen floors a few times to get the point across.  She does, in the voice of Joan, go into a lot of detail of the interpersonal relationships within the Rosenbach family and her relationships with them.  A lot of time is devoted to Joan's attempts to win over Malka, who comes across as quite cranky and stubborn.  Schlitz is also very good here at peeling back the layers of her characters.  Joan learns that her initial impressions aren't always the correct ones.  The most notable example lies with Mrs. Rosenbach, who is refined and elegant, just what Joan strives to become and admires.  However, Mrs. Rosenbach has her judgmental side, that she displays to Joan with just enough frequency to disillusion Joan about outward appearances.

Schlitz writes Joan as a blank canvas, who slowly gains more knowledge of the world and the other people in it as she integrates herself in life outside her father's farm.  Therefore, Joan is as innocent as a baby when it comes to some of the nastier elements of society, like anti-Semitism and religious persecution.  Joan is such a babe in the woods that she doesn't recognize that David's flirting with her is just empty flirting.  There are things that Joan says or does out of a place of ignorance, the most glaring example being her attempts to convert the Rosenbachs, which she only ceases to pursue when Mr. Rosenbach gently, and in a way that allows Joan to come to the conclusion herself, informs her why they consider it insulting, to say the least.  While this technique allows the audience to see the level of Joan's considerable growth over the course of the novel, it left her open to charges of cultural insensitivity.  There are much better and far more experienced librarians than me who have debated this issue, particularly over at Elizabeth Bird's blog for School Library Journal "A Fuse 8 Production."  I do understand why people are upset over Joan's statements about Aboriginal people, but in the world of 1911, would it ring true for Joan to make the kind of enlightened statements we expect of ourselves in 2016?  If Joan had charged in, wearing full armor on a white horse, so to speak, brandishing equality for all like a sword, would it ring true to readers or throw them out of Schlitz's carefully crafted world?  Can we trust readers to see that Joan is coming from a horribly ignorant and limited situation?

I do wonder if some of the outrage over Joan and The Hired Girl in general is because people think of Schlitz as a writer primarily for children, and think that a librarian will just hand The Hired Girl to the average 10 year old, with no thought to providing context.  It would have to be an exceptional 10 year old for me to recommend it to someone searching for books in the juvenile stacks.  Really, it's firmly in the Young Adult category.  As much as I enjoyed The Hired Girl, I'm not sure how much of an audience it will have outside historical fiction enthusiasts.  It would have to be one heck of a booktalk to make it appeal to readers who don't usually reach for historical fiction.  The rich detail Schiltz provides and the conflicts of so many disparate personalities under one roof should help appeal to readers who enjoy a good story.  In many ways, The Hired Girl reminds me of Downton Abbey: a soap opera elevated by its time period, but still, a soap opera nonetheless.  

For those of you who keep score of such things, The Hired Girl received the 2016 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.  It's also been given a Horn Book Award Honor for fiction in 2016.