Some books take a while to get into, but this one had me gripped right from the start. This is a true story based on the Loray Mill Strike in a North Carolina mill in 1929. The mill workers were barely earning enough to keep their families alive, and without a strike, nothing was ever going to change. The book follows one of the mill workers, Ella May Wiggins, who has no choice but to leave her children alone at night as she goes out to the mill to put in her 14 hour shift. Her useless husband has left her to cope on her own, and things don't get much better when she finds another man who can't hold down a job. Ella is a poor white woman from the mountains, and she is living in a shack where all her neighbours are all black, and this is unusual during the time of racial segregation but she sees all the mill workers as equal in their struggle to get by. One day she finds a leaflet advertising a union rally for the workers that is taking place in the ne...