In Prohibition-era New York City, Eunice Ritter, an indomitable
ten-year-old girl, finds work in a sweat shop--an industrial
laundry--after impairing her older brother with a blow to the head in a
sibling tussle. When the diminutive girl first enters the sorting room,
she encounters a giant: Gussie, the largest human being she has ever
seen.
Gussie, a powerful, hard-working woman, soon becomes Eunice's mentor and
sole friend as she finds herself entrapped in the laundry's sorting room
by the Great Depression, sentenced to bring her low wages home to her
alcoholic parents as penance for her childhood mistake. Then, on her
sixteenth birthday, Eunice becomes pregnant and her drunken father
demands that the culprit marry his daughter, trapping her anew--this
time in a loveless marriage, along with a child she never wanted. Within
a couple of years, Eunice makes a grave error and settles into a lonely
life of drudgery that she views as her own doing. She spends decades in
virtual solitude before her secret history is revealed to those from
whom she has withheld her love.
An epic family saga, The Sorting Room is a captivating tale of a
woman's struggle and perseverance in faint hopes of reconciliation, if
not redemption.
