The Sorting Room - by Michael Rose (Paperback)

About the Book

A girl coming of age during America's Great Depression, Eunice Ritter was born to uncaring alcoholic parents and destined for a life of low-wage toil--a difficult, lonely existence of scant choices. This epic novel—which spans decades—shows how hard work and the memory of a single friendship gave the indomitable Eunice the perseverance to pursue redemption and forgiveness for the grievous mistakes she made early in her life.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Rose has composed an affecting and unpredictable story, unsentimental and unflinching."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A moving and evocative tale, sweeping in scope, and beautifully narrated. Its depiction of Depression-era New York City is vivid and haunting. The Sorting Room is a memorable and inspirational saga about the power of one woman's indomitable will, and its reverberations on the extended family she creates."
--Robert Steven Goldstein, author of Cat's Whisker, Enemy Queen, and The Swami Deheftner

About the Author

Michael Rose was raised on a small family dairy farm in Upstate New York. He retired after serving in executive positions for several global multinational enterprises. He has been a non-executive director for three public companies headquartered in the US. He lives and writes in San Francisco.