Through the eyes of three young women, readers are brought back in time to experience the events centering around the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. It is most well known for the tragic fire that took the lives of so many in 1911, but there was also an important labor strike there in 1910 that influenced the treatment of workers in America's factories and the women's rights movement.

Bella has just arrived from Italy. She has come across on her own to raise money for her mother and younger siblings after her father has passed away, leaving them destitute. She speaks no English and is faced with challenges when the family she came across with was sent back home at Ellis Island due to an eye illness.

Yetta and her family came to the US to escape the Russian pogroms that decimated the Jewish population there. Since her arrival, she and her sister Rahel have gotten jobs at the Triangle Shirtwaist family only to fully experience the horrible working conditions. Yetta's concerns about this bring her front and center in the labor movement and the resulting strike.

Jane is the only daughter of a successful industrialist. They are looked down by the 400 in New York because there money is newer, but she has all the charm and graces of the wealthy that came to power in the late 1800s and still ruled Society since. She wants to be indenpendent, go to college and be a new woman. She and her friends get involved with the factory during the strike to help out the other girls, who are being treated unfairly by the police as well.

The girls quickly become friends and are a strong support system for each other as they deal both with the challenges at the fire and during the strike as well as they are confronted by the harsh realities of life at that time.

The girls voices are realistic and the story moves along, introducing a number of characters surrounding the girls that provide a great deal of depth to the story and the issues being presented through the narrative. I was really glad that I read this one. I am a fan of historical fiction, and I have to admit tha I did not know all that much about these incidents. Learning about them from the perspective of people than just from history books made the events a lot more powerful.

There is a strong Author's Note at the end that highlights more details about the events that happen in the book.