Review:

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

And so begins Stephanie Land’s chronicle of poverty in America. Land had dreams of being a writer, but an unexpected pregnancy prompted her to postpone her plans of college. Instead, she worked as a maid to support herself and her daughter, scrubbing toilets and washing countertops to provide for them. Maid is a story of a woman tenaciously attempting to work her way out of poverty. Land shares her experiences of navigating government assistance programs, trying to find safe childcare, and living in dismal housing conditions, all while making a less-than-livable wage.

I minored in economics while earning my undergraduate degree, so I did a fair amount of learning about government programs. However, it’s one thing to look at programs like Temporary Assistant to Needy Families (TANF) from a macroeconomic perspective; it’s quite another to hear the experience of someone who relies on it to be able to feed her daughter. Maid is a magnificent exploration of class in America, and I would recommend it to any adult who is willing to learn about the challenges faced by the lower class.

Favorite Passage:

As I pushed my cart away, my hands still shaking, the old man nodded towards my groceries and said, “You’re welcome!”
I grew infuriated. “You’re welcome for what?” I wanted to yell back at him. That he’d waited so impatiently, huffing and grumbling to his wife? It couldn’t have been that. It was that I was obviously poor, and shopping in the middle of the day, pointedly not at work. He didn’t know I had to take an afternoon off for the WIC appointment, missing $40 in wages, where they had to weigh both Mia and me. We left with a booklet of coupons that supplemented about the same as those lost wages, but not the disgruntled client whom I’d had to reschedule, who might, if I ever needed to reschedule again, go with a different cleaner, because my work was that disposable. But what he saw was that those coupons were paid for by government money, the money he’d personally contributed to with the taxes he’d paid. To him, he might as well have personally bought the fancy milk I insisted on, but I was obviously poor so I didn’t deserve it.

What I Loved Most:

Land doesn’t pull any punches in her writing. At one point, she tells the story of when her daughter (Mia) attended a birthday party. Mia came home and eagerly exclaimed that there were tons and tons of berries at the party, and Mia could eat all the berries she wanted. Stephanie reflects on how much she wishes she could regularly buy berries for her daughter, but the cost is far out of what she can afford. In our current culture, people who are on government assistance programs are often criticized for using food stamps to buy unhealthy food. Stories like this one help humanize the people who utilize government programs. It’s harder to criticize someone when you understand their story. In my opinion, Maid will go a far way toward increasing empathy and decreasing judgment of people who use government programs.

Read this book if you like:

Economics, the American dream, heart-wrenching stories of struggle, humanizing politics

Book Details:

• Author: Stephanie Land
• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Date of Publication: January 22, 2019
• Age Recommendation: Adult
• Find Maid on Amazon if you’d like to own a copy!
• Check out Marked By Love on Worldcat to find it at a library near you!