Gr 5-9 --In this superb novel, Paterson deftly depicts a Lowell, Massachusetts fabric mill in the 1840s and a factory girl whose life is changed by her experiences there. Readers first meet 13-year-old Lyddie Worthen staring down a bear on her family' debt-ridden farm in the Vermont mountains. With her fierce spirit, she stares down a series of metaphorical bears in her year as a servant girl at an inn and then in her months under grueling conditions...

In the diary account of her journey from Ireland in 1847 and of her work in a mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Mary reveals a great longing for her family.

"A young mother desperately tries to hold her family together in the years before the Great Depression."--

"Following up The One Man and The Saboteur, Gross's next historical thriller brings to life the drama of the birth of organized crime in 1930s New York City from the tale of one family"--

Twelve-year-old Hannalee Reed, forced to relocate to Indiana along with other Georgia millworkers during the Civil War, leaves her mother with a promise to return home as soon as the war ends.

Fleeing the life of the Sakers, Arabella Newberry finds work in the industrial mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. But the taste of freedom she experiences only increases her longing for true equality for all the mill girls.

"It's Christmastime in Russell, North Carolina. For Laurel Granger, the holiday can't pass quickly enough. With her fiteen-year marriage ending, the visit to her hometown is bound to be even more painful than usual. And the worst part will be looking at the lives of her mother, Pansy, and Pansy's gossipy group of friends, for whom life revolves around the plant, the aging textile mill where for decades they have found companionship, a modest livelihood,...