Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Publishes in USA
Jan 22, 2019
288 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
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.
"My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter."
While the gap between upper middle-class Americans and the working poor widens, grueling low-wage domestic and service work - primarily done by women - fuels the economic success of the wealthy. Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society.
While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.
Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, 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. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.
"Starred Review. Heartfelt and powerful...Land's love for her daughter ("We were each other's moon and sun") shines brightly through the pages of this beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty." - Kirkus
"Land has perhaps succeeded in having her story told by virtue of her eventual triumph in escaping the grind of poverty. Her journey offers an illuminating read that should inspire outrage, hope, and change." - Library Journal
"Land's prose is vivid and engaging... [A] tightly-focused, well-written memoir... an incredibly worthwhile read." - Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger: A Memoir
"In Maid, Stephanie Land, a gifted storyteller with an eye for details you'll never forget, exposes what it's like to exist in America as a single mother, working herself sick cleaning our dirty toilets, one missed paycheck away from destitution. It's a perspective we seldom see represented firsthand - and one we so desperately need right now. Timely, urgent, and unforgettable, this is memoir at its very best." - Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
"A sad and hopeful tale of being on the outside looking in, the author makes us wonder how'd we fare scrubbing and vacuuming away the detritus of an affluence that always seems beyond reach." - Steve Dublanica, New York Times bestselling author of Waiter Rant
"As a solo mom and former house cleaner, this brave book resonated with me on a very deep level...This memoir of resilience and love has never been more necessary." - Domenica Ruta, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You
The information about Maid shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.
Journalist Stephanie Land's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through both the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
As atmospheric, tense, and explosive as her New York Times bestselling debut, The Dry!
About the book
House of Stone
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
A masterful debut, pulsing with dark humor, that explores the often destructive act of history-making.
Reader Reviews
Uncommon Type
by Tom Hanks
Surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and a must-have for Tom Hanks fans!
Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. Full access is for members only.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.
Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.
