Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publishing year: 2002

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Rating: 3/5

Synopsis:

Rose Nolan arrives on Ellis Island in 1911, and after part of her family is sent back to Ireland, she is left to provide for herself and her younger sister. While she misses her native Ireland and her family, she has a strong sense of self-preservation and she gets a job working in a factory. Rose finds America a strange place and just when she starts to settle in to her new home, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire brings tragedy to her door. How will she find the courage to continue in America?

Review:

Prior to reading Auch’s novel, I have read Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix, another historical fiction novel that’s based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which I have reviewed here, and I found myself comparing the two as I read.

I liked how this novel shed some light on Rose’s passage from Ireland to America and her experience going through Ellis Island. While Uprising spent the majority of its pages covering the strikes and picketing, this book begins just a rough month before the fire. The unions and strikes are mentioned but this is more of a coming to age novel. Still it was a pleasant read.

It’s understandable that Michael, Rose’s father returned to Ireland with his infant son and left his daughters in the care of their mother in America. I understood what a tough decision that must have been, but a necessary one considering the price of passage. Having their mother return leaving her two oldest daughters, Rose and Maureen, in a foreign country is a tad bit harder to believe.

The best quality of this novel is Rose herself. She steps off the ferry a greenhorn, without any knowledge of labor laws or unions and despite a bit of worry she never endures a true hardship aside from homesickness, whereas the girls in Haddix’s novel nearly starve to death. Then the fire happens, and it changes her. It is her rite of passage where she stops being a sixteen-year-old girl and becomes a responsible adult.  The novel doesn’t cover much after the fire but it does leave the reader with a sense of hope for Rose and her sister.

A quote from Maureen sums it up nicely, “We should stay here in America. I think we’ll be all right from now on. Because, as long as we live, we’ll never have another day as terrible as the twenty-fifth of March 1911.”

One last thing to note is the writing style of Auch. The book is written in first person through Rose’s perspective and being that she is Irish; the author wrote the way Rose would speak. The simplest example: Walking becomes walkin’. At first, it bothered me but once I fell into the story the tone flowed smoothly.

A low rating for a story I genuinely liked. It just didn’t have enough detail for my liking, and while I’m aware it was written for a younger audience I can’t help but feel that Auch couldn’t have implemented more history and research into this novel.

Question: Thinking of yourself at sixteen years of age, do you think you could live in a separate country from your parents with no means to support yourself other than a low paying job in harsh conditions?