Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I started reading Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Kids on Strike to my older girlies a LONG time ago, folks. (Like, over two years ago.) At the time, they’d seen a cousin in her high school’s production of “Newsies” and they were interested; I was hoping to combine a book I wanted to read with our reading aloud time. It went along pretty well, considering, until we got to the chapter on the Newsies’ strike. It was Christmas-time, the book was due and not renewable, and by the time life slowed down and it was possible to pick back up again, my girls’ enthusiasm for listening to nonfiction had cooled. I still wanted to finish it, however, and so I kept renewing it or checking it back out again. (This was complicated by the fact that our library system only has one copy, and it’s frequently on hold.) I recently determined to revisit my “currently reading” list on Goodreads, however, and so I determined to start moving through Kids on Strike. It’s totally interesting material, but the presence of four school-age children in my house leaves me struggling to concentrate on nonfiction at the end of the day (and completely unable to concentrate on it when they’re awake and home), and so it was a process. When someone once again put it on hold, though, I decided to power through so I wouldn’t have to wait for him or her to read it before getting it back.

I finished it tonight.

It really is fascinating stuff, folks. Some of the strikes I knew about (and had read fiction about, in at least one case); some I’d never heard of. Some I wholeheartedly sympathized with while the issues (or methods) of others felt more complicated to me. All in all, Kids on Strike covers both a goodly portion of the history of child labor in America and a piece of the amazing legacy that our children and youth have created in this country. It’s a book well worth your time.