Shelly's Book Blog

Bread and Roses, Too, by Katherine Paterson, transports readers to Lawrence, Massachusetts during the 1912 mill workers' strike. Rosa Serutti lives with her family in a tenement near the mill where her mother and sister work. Like all the mill workers, they are extremely poor and often do not have enough to eat. Rosa is lucky enough to be able to attend school, yet her mother cannot afford to buy all the books and other supplies Rosa needs.

At the beginning of the story, Rosa meets Jake Beale, a boy who is even worse off than she. Jake's father is pretty much good for nothing, and Jake often is afraid to go home, so he sleeps wherever he can. When Rosa allows him to sleep in her family's home one night, the two kids do not exactly become friends, but they renew their acquaintance later in the story when they meet on a train bound for Vermont. Rosa, along with many other children of the striking mill workers, is sent to live temporarily in Barre, Vermont, where union sympathizers take them in until the end of the strike. Jake was not supposed to be on the train, so he asks Rosa to help him by saying he is her brother. Rosa reluctantly agrees, and of course her first small lie is only the first in a series of lies that become necessary to explain Jake's presence.