Description
When the father she worships disappears, ten-year-old Ada Fletcher and her family are forced to move to a poor yard in Birmingham. Ada and Elsie, the two eldest children, go to work in a local pearl button factory to try to make ends meet. The work is hard and relentless, and their mother's death is the final calamity. When Ada returns home one day, she finds her siblings being dragged away to the local workhouse orphanage.
Only her quick-thinking neighbour, Sarah Connell, saves Ada from a similar fate by pretending Ada is her child. She finds a new home with her neighbours but the Connells have problems of their own, with too many children, not enough money, and Sarah's increasing reliance on drink to dull the problems of both.
But Ada is determined to be more than just a factory girl and find a way to reunite with her siblings. One day, she finds a way to escape the Connells. And so begins Ada's journey through her teeming, industrial city in search of family and of a home and life to call her own.
This gritty and heartwarming saga from Annie Murray is the first novel in a new series set in Victorian Birmingham following the trials and triumphs of the Fletcher family.