Review of Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch

I teach a class in Young Adult literature and have written a Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature, published by Greenwood Press. So I read a lot of YA literature, and my current reading is guided mostly by the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list.
Ashes of Roses is a historical novel, set in New York City in 1911, chronicling the immigrant experience from the perspective of a 16-year-old Irish girl who finds a job in the infamous Triangle Waist Company, the sweatshop where a fire killed almost 150 immigrant workers, mostly women, because they were locked into the shop on the ninth floor. The title grimly puns on the popular pastel fabric shade, "ashes of roses," and the deaths of protagonist Rose Nolan's two friends, Rose Klein and Rose Bellini. Their ethnic identities are typical of the majority of the women employed there. In an Afterword, Auch writes that she used her immigrant grandmother's name, Margaret Rose Nolan, for the protagonist, having learned that the company employed at least one Irish immigrant, and her research revealed that seventeen of the young women employed there were named Rose. While many of the victims died in the fire, as on 9/11, many leaped to their deaths rather than burn, some of them hoping against hope that the firefighters would be able to catch them.
In Auch's story, the tragic fire is linked explicitly with the union movement, as the young woman, Gussie, who gets Rose her job in the factory is an active labor organizer. In the novel we see only the labor issues prior to the disaster, since the novel ends almost immediately after the fire, somewhat abruptly. In actuality, the Triangle fire stirred public sympathy and advanced the union cause of more humane conditions for garment industry workers.
Auch's story shows clearly why so many immigrant women were willing to accept the exploitative conditions in which they worked. Young Margaret Rose, who sheds the first name she shares with her mother in her effort to forge a new identity for herself in America, experiences the breakup of her family when, first, her baby brother is turned away at Ellis Island and her father accompanies him back to Ireland and, later, her demoralized mother follows him back to Ireland because she is made to feel unwelcome, ignorant, and indigent in her brother-in-law's home. Rose and her twelve-year-old sister Maureen balk at being taken back to Ireland, where they know the limited and limiting future that awaits them, lying to their mother so that she will leave them behind and then trying to support themselves, first with piecework at home, then with factory work. Rose's encounters with the disdainful prejudice against the greenhorn make her desperate to be self-supporting, at the same time that she is ignorant of the dangers that lurk not only in the alleys but in the exploitative businesses that offer work to young women with limited skills.
Rose's hope for her future rests on the skills she has begun to learn from her mother, a seamstress and maker of fine dresses in Limerick. She owns a lovely dress made in the fashionable "ashes of roses" fabric because her mother was given a damaged length of fabric rejected by the Limerick shop, fabric from which she designed a fashionable dress for her oldest daughter. Significantly, Rose is wearing the dress on the day of the fire, because she plans to go out to a movie with her friends after work.
Auch is at her best in portraying the challenges of finding one's way in a new country, fresh from Ellis Island, challenges that are exacerbated by the forcible splitting up of families. The hopes and fears, the confidence and strength of determination that turned immigrants into American citizens are sympathetically depicted in the naive Rose and her feisty little sister. She also provides a sympathetic portrait of Rose's uncle, a man transformed by his years in America who treasures his youthful memories of home and family but who has adapted to his new home by becoming just a little less Irish, a little more Irish-American.
One feature I found a bit annoying was the author's substitution of an apostrophe for the g in present participles/gerunds. I probably wouldn't have minded it in dialogue, but it was also used consistently in the first-person narration.
This novel would be an excellent text to use in conjunction with social studies lessons on the immigrant experience and the union movement. Cornell University hosts an excellent documentary exhibit on the fire at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/. Scholastic maintains an interactive teaching site on Ellis Island at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/index.htm, and several immigrants' stories are featured at the Ellis Island.org site (http://www.ellisisland.org/).