Maid Book Review

I got a recommendation from my mom's group for this one so I put Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land on my reserve list at the library.  There were lots of people on the list but it finally came on to my shelf.  I knew nothing about the book but I was excited to get started.  My one problem was that I put it farther down in the pile and I actually started to read it on the day that it was due so I was under a serious time crunch.  I started first thing in the morning and finished in time to take it back to the library before they closed.  It was a little tight but a great read that had me not wanting to put the book down.

Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.

At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly.

She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) coupons to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance while she didn't feel lucky at all. She wrote to remember the fight, to eventually cut through the deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor.

Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes about her relationship with her clients, many of whom do not know her from any other cleaner, but who she learns plenty about. As she begins to discover more about her clients' lives-their sadness and love, too-she begins to find hope in her own path.

Her compassionate, unflinching writing as a journalist gives voice to the "servant" worker, and those pursuing the American Dream from below the poverty line. Maid is Stephanie's story, but it's not her alone. It is an inspiring testament to the strength, determination, and ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

I thought it was an amazing book and really opened my eyes to the struggles that many people go through.  I was immediately drawn into the speaker and I was hoping for everything to work out for her.  Stephanie was graduating from high school and ready to start her college education when she ended up pregnant.  She had to figure out how to support herself and her child so she started to clean houses.  She learned that as a maid that she was mostly invisible to the home owners and she worked very hard to do the best that she could do for very little money.  She was on food stamps and getting assistance from a bunch of different agencies just to keep her head above water.  She was fighting for her and her child and frequently was tired, sore and hungry just to make sure that her child had enough.  It was a heart breaking story and I had trouble putting it down.  I think that everyone can find an interesting part of this story to relate to and should check it out.