oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for BEST MEMOIR & AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2019! what will happen?**********************************************fulfilling book riot's 2018 read harder challenge task #14: A book of social sciencethis one might be more memoir than social science, but it's ehrenreich-approved and that's good enough for me!!**********************************************okay, so i would say this is definitely more memoir than social science, but i went into it with good intentions, a...

I wanted to like this book. I was raised by a single mother with two kids after fleeing horrific abuse. We were on government assistance and food stamps, and I was on free or reduced lunch all the way through my adolescent years. My GED holding mother worked early mornings, late nights, and took every opportunity afforded to her. She worked as a waitress, at construction sites, as a water truck driver. Anything to support us.By every stretch of the imagination, I should have DEEPLY connected wit...

Maid is Stephanie Land's memoir of her arduous and often back-breaking journey to claw herself out of poverty and to find a place of belonging and financial stability for her and her young daughter. It details her desperation to take on any menial jobs available to make ends meet while being a single mother, taking night classes to complete her degree, and being on government assistance that barely bridged the gap to food and shelter.I found the writing to be stirring and heartbreaking. Land oft...

“I WORK 25 HOURS A WEEK AS A PROFESSIONAL CLEANER, BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO PAY THE BILLS.” (Page 131)Going into this book, I so badly wanted to come out rooting for Stephanie Land, but I keep coming back to that quote above and cannot wrap my head around what should be “surprising” about her story. As a college educated woman who works for one of the largest companies in the world, if I worked 25 hours a week it would not be enough to pay my bills either. Is there a larger theme I’m missing that

I appreciate the emphasis on what it’s like to be in poverty, from the logistical struggles to the emotional turmoil that comes with being financially burdened. Not to mention the stigma that gets associated with people who depend on government assistance and the homeless. My upbringing has fostered a troubling relationship with money as well, and I’ve worked on having a healthier attitude now that I’m more secure in my life, but damn does this book bring me back to those stresses! I typically g...

This book is TERRIBLE. I cannot understand why it's being compared to “Nickeled and Dimed” or “Evicted”, both of which are well written, researched and coherent. But this? It’s nothing but a 200+ page Go-Fund-Me rant. The writing is also very poor, alternating between pretentious and sloppy ("off of" is not a synonym for “from”, for God's sake). Which was disappointing, as I was very interested in reading Stephanie Land's story & experiences. I was a single mother as a teenager. I know firsthand...

This book is going to garner a range of reactions when it’s published. What this book does well is illuminate the struggles of poverty and single-motherhood, the unrelenting frustration of having no safety net, the ways in which our society is systemically designed to keep impoverished people mired in poverty, the indignity of poverty by way of unmovable bureaucracy, and people’s lousy attitudes toward poor people. When she writes about her circumstances, Land’s prose is vivid and engaging. Her

Stephanie Land didn’t experience the best start in life, well not when it comes down to the most important thing for a child - love. Neither parent seemed to have much of it to give, in fact they present themselves as extremely selfish individuals. Stephanie finds herself pregnant and in an abusive relationship, which should herald the end of her dreams of going to college, but this is one thing that she will try desperately to hang onto.We accompany Stephanie and her daughter Mia, as they attem...

Wish I could have climbed into these pages and given this young woman a hug! Nineteen pregnant, she leaves an abusive relationship. When her daughter is born she is a single mother with few resources and very little support. This is a honest, down to earth, telling of her story trying to manuver through a system that is stacked against her. She is a hard worker and takes the only job she can get, while still taking care of her daughter, and taking online classes in a effort to provide for a bett...

Why would a woman in her late 20s who had not applied herself to gaining any marketable skills, had no savings and a boyfriend who didn't want to be a father, have a baby? Did she not have the foresight to see that this was going to lead to an extremely hard life dependent on others and on government benefits? Did she feel the world owed her a living? She wasn't after all, an accidentally-pregnant 16 year old schoolgirl with no knowledge of life. It was no surprise to me after this that she was

DNF on page 260, at 96%I tried really, really hard to finish the 2019 memoir, "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive," by Stephanie Land. But I couldn't force myself to read the final chapter. I just hated this book too much, and the idea of reading another page brought me agony.I wish I had never heard of this book. I certainly wish I had never paid full price for a first edition hardback. I thought I was supporting a fellow woman who had grown up in poverty and found a way o...

First, this book is most certainly NOT in the category of Evicted, one of the most well-researched, measured and thoughtful books published on the subject of chronic poverty in America. I wanted to like this book, and feel that the subject matter is critically important to expose and discuss. Yet...I just didn't. There's a kind of immaturity about the book (and frankly, many of the author's actions) that grated, especially the flip-flopping between envy and judgment of the middle class families

FOUR STARSI saw Stephanie Land, the author, on my hometown local morning television show. I was struck by her sincerity, her soft voice, and her courage in “outing” herself as a single mother struggling to survive in poverty. Land’s memoir begins with her unexpected pregnancy by a new boyfriend at age 28. The boyfriend is more than a jerk and Land gets away from him once he becomes violent. Without any family help that she could count on, Land lives with her baby daughter in a homeless shelter a...

I am kind of on the fence about the message in this book.First of all:(1) I really felt for Ms. Land and the disheartening reactions she received from family, friends and even strangers regarding her predicament as a single mom living in poverty; however, even though she made some questionable choices, I admire Ms. Land overall for having the foresight, the dream and the tenacity to improve her lot in life for herself and her young daughter.(2) As a Canadian who truly appreciates universal healt...

It took me awhile to figure out what troubled me so much about this book. Stay with me. Please understand that I'm politically quite far to the left of center. I believe that social services in the US are woefully, horribly inadequate. No one in the USA should wake up hungry or sick with nowhere to turn. While our country offers much in the way of opportunity, it is all too easy to crash and burn. Also, please understand also that I personally take nothing for granted. I wake up every morning in...

This is one book that I’ve grappled with in trying to write a review. There are a few conflicting impressions that I’ve turned over in my mind, causing me to question why I feel as I do about the story. I thought about just giving a glossed-over review, focusing only on what I appreciated (and there was a lot to appreciate) about this account of a young, single mother’s struggle to survive and raise her child. I wanted to be generous, but I finally decided to just write the review to include wha...

My mother once told me that her greatest fear was to end up homeless, a so-called "bag lady." I, a short-sighted, selfish teenager, just rolled my eyes, but even then the thought of her vulnerability chilled me. I'm older now that she was when she made this confession, and her fear has become mine. Because I have seen, and experienced first-hand, how one decision, one misstep, can cause the dominoes of disaster to fall around you. “I knew that at any moment, a breeze could come and blow me away....

"Poverty was like a stagnant pool of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go." from Maid by Stephanie LandI'll be brutally honest, and you can "unfollow" me if you want, I don't care, but ever since Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson created social programs to help the poor there have been politicians determined to slash, limit, and end them. And one of their methods is to vilify the poor as blood-sucking, lazy, ignorant, "self-entitled" criminals who live off the hard earned tax dollars...

In Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, we meet Stephanie Land, a single mom to her daughter, Mia, trying to keep a roof over their heads and maintain some form of stable life. This is easier said than done as Stephanie is met with numerous challenges including little support from her family, Mia’s father, and other relationships, as well as multiple jobs with low paying wages that rarely allow those performing them to get ahead. A few years ago I read Evicted, which I reall...

3+ starsMaid has an important message and I have a lot of respect and sympathy for Stephanie Land, but I didn’t love reading her book. In her late 20s, Land found herself coming out of an abusive relationship as the single mother of a toddler. She had very few financial options, so she took what help she could from government assistance and started working as a maid. Her book is a memoir of the three or four years she struggled to support herself and her daughter before finding a way to get into...