Ever since the untimely death of her mother, 14 year-old Joan Skraggs has been desperately unhappy. Under the thumb of her cruel father and three sullen brothers, Joan lives like a servant on their farm just outside of Lancaster, forever cooking, cleaning, and attending to the many demands of the home. But she has little freedom, and less support from her family for her love of reading and blossoming interest in education. But when her father tells Joan she can't go to school anymore, it sets off a journey that will see her become first a runaway, then a hired girl on $6 a week, and finally her very own young woman. Set in America during the optimistic years before the First World War, and told through a series of journal entries, THE HIRED GIRL is the story of a young girl in search of Real Life and True Love. It takes in feminism and housework; money, religion, and social class; literature and education, romanticism and realism, first love and sexual yearnings, cats, hats, and bunions. And it's a comedy.
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Laura Amy Schlitz is the author of the Newbery Medal winner Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village; the Newbery Honor Book and bestseller Splendors and Glooms; the Scott O’Dell Award winner The Hired Girl; the chapter book The Night Fairy; and other critically acclaimed books for young readers. She is a teacher as well as a writer in Maryland.
Rachel Botchan holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a member of the Pearl Theater Company in New York. She and her husband live in New York City.