Book Review | Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land's memoir recounts her experience as a young, single mother living in poverty in Washington and working as a house cleaner. Without her family to rely on as a safety net, Stephanie is plunged into a world where she scrapes to get by. She finds herself in several unsatisfactory living situations from a homeless shelter to a moldy apartment. By day, she works as a cleaner for Classic Clean making minimum wage. Her income is bolstered by governmental aid like WIC and Medicaid, but even with her rigorous work schedule and public aid, she still cannot make ends meet and provide for her daughter.

Land's story tugged at my heart as a mother. She was doing everything she knew how to put food on the table for herself and her child, but it only took a small setback in life to throw them off course for months financially. Living like this was stressful and exhausting, but Land continued to work as hard as she could to keep everything going.

I appreciated her honest account and perspective of what it is like to live on minimum wage while trying to support a child. Nothing she did ever seemed to be enough, and she was juggling school on top of it.

She gives an inside look at each of the families she cleaned for and how it made her feel when she was noticed or not. This wasn't the life she thought she would have, but she did what she could to make it work. This is a great book to learn more about how people truly fare on public aid in the United States and what it is like to work in an environment where you are often invisible or looked down upon.

I highly recommend listening to the audio version of this book over the print version. It is narrated by the author and hearing it through her voice makes her story even more impactful.