Galena, an eleven-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant, lives in New York City with her family and works at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory with her older sister Anya. The factory pays low wages and has terrible working conditions, making Anya yearn to join a union. Soon a horrible fire guts the factory leaving Galena with painful, horrific memories. Follow author Suzanne Lieurance in this dramatic historical fiction novel, as she describes how Galena uses the support of friends, family, and Jewish traditions to inspire her to fight for workers rights.

EXCERPT

I smelled smoke.

I looked over in the direction where Miss Harris was pointing.

Flames were leaping up from one of the bins under a table in the center of the room.

Small fires often started at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company so I did not get excited about this one. Now, several of the men who were tailors on our floor were dousing the flames with water from the metal buckets that lined the walls of the room, as they usually did when small fires broke out. But today that only seemed to feed the fire. Max Rother was standing there with the other tailors.

Surely Mr. Rother can put out the fire.

Surprisingly, all Mr. Rother did was watch the other men. He must have been paralyzed with fear, as so many other people appeared to be, now that the fire was spreading.

Mr. Bernstein rushed to help the tailors, but the fire kept getting larger and larger, feeding on scraps of fabric in the room, so he and another man dragged in a water hose. It was rotted in places, and water would not flow through it, so they quickly tossed the hose aside.

Girls were screaming as they pushed past me to get to the stairway door as I stood there wondering which way to turn. The girls were so excited they forgot that the door opened inward, so they could not open it.

"Back up," yelled one of the girls, "or we'll never get this door open!"